Word: microchip
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...hardest hit model is the top-of-the-line 928. Young is doing the once unthinkable: cutting prices. Yet he knows that many of his would-be customers harbor hopes of becoming the latest in a string of entrepreneurs who have made millions by inventing a better microchip. Nobody wants to believe that the fabled region's heydays are gone forever. Says Young: "If the headlines are good for three or four days running and people are feeling optimistic, business picks right up. It's good for at least a few cars...
...called Searcher. Designed by Carl Ebeling, a Carnegie-Mellon graduate student, and manufactured under a Defense Department grant, Searcher is a bread-box- size device that contains 64 special-purpose microprocessors. Each is assigned & to one square of the chessboard. When a piece lands on a particular square, the microchip dedicated to that square determines the likely outcomes. Operating at peak speeds, the 64 chips can evaluate more than 175,000 positions per sec., or 30 million in the 3 min. allowed for each move of tournament play...
...every day have at least one feature in common: in technological terms, they are all dumb. Soon, however, many people will be carrying "smart" cards equipped with tiny electronic brains similar to those now found in everything from cars to computers. French scientists have developed a card containing a microchip that can store at least 100 times as much data as the magnetic strips on standard charge plates...
...grotesque?) of his several love interests (or should one say sex objects?) is the black pantheresque model, Grace Jones. The villain, joylessly played by Christopher Walken, this time schemes improbably to blast open the San Andreas Fault, wiping out Silicon Valley so that he can corner the microchip market. If the picture did not carry the credits of Writers Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson and Director John Glen, one would suspect it was made by microchips making overdrafts on a depleted memory bank. It is exhausted and exhausting, an old joke retold once too often...
...slowdown in computer sales has been most devastating for the semiconductor industry. When the market was strong, computer firms were all wildly optimistic in placing their microchip orders. Says Ken McKenzie, an associate director of the Dataquest research firm in Sunnyvale, Calif.: "Every company that produced a clone of the IBM Personal Computer expected to get 22% of the market, and there were 60 of those companies." When computer makers realized that their sales would not come close to expectations, they started canceling chip orders, leaving the semiconductor companies to sit on mountains of inventories. The glut of chips drove...