Word: planetful
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...last one. Today, millions of transistors, each costing far less than a staple, can be etched on wafers of silicon. On these microchips, all the world's information and entertainment can be stored in digital form, processed and zapped to every nook of a networked planet. And in 1997, as the U.S. completed nearly seven years of growth, the microchip has become the dynamo of a new economy marked by low unemployment, negligible inflation and a rationally exuberant stock market...
These traits have allowed Grove to push with paranoiac obsession the bounds of innovation and to build Intel, which makes nearly 90% of the planet's PC microprocessors, into a company worth $115 billion (more than IBM), with $5.1 billion in annual profits (seventh most profitable in the world) and an annual return to investors of 44% during the past 10 years. Other great entrepreneurs, most notably the visionary wizard Bill Gates, have become richer and better known by creating the software that makes use of the microchip. But more than any other person, Andy Grove has made real...
...result is one of the great statistical zingers of our age: every month, 4 quadrillion transistors are produced, more than half a million for every human on the planet. Intel's space-suited workers etch more than 7 million, in lines one four-hundredth the thickness of a human hair, on each of its thumbnail-size Pentium II chips, which sell for about $500 and can make 588 million calculations a second...
...great chemists of the century) and Robert Noyce (a co-inventor of the integrated circuit), it has blossomed under Grove's leadership into the world's pre-eminent microprocessor manufacturer. From a standing start in 1981, when IBM introduced the first personal computers, they have populated the planet at an astounding rate. And of the 83 million machines sold this year, nearly 90% get their kick from an Intel chip. So do antilock brakes, Internet servers, cell phones and digital cameras. And who knows what products not yet invented will be powered by the chip 10, 20 years from...
Biological weapons are proliferating. They are cheap and deadly [WORLD, Dec. 1]. Anyone who uses them risks killing off nearly everyone on the planet. It is a big mistake to think Saddam Hussein is an enemy solely of the U.S. He is an enemy of the human species. He is apparently willing to risk destroying our civilization and sending us into another Dark Ages. We need a U.N. that is strong enough to prevent one country from invading another. We have a right to die of old age, not germ warfare. ROB JOHNSON Urbana...