Word: silicon
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...fast and slow are present in every country, often, and in every household. Ancient cultures, as in India and China, are eager to invite the future to come to stay, so long as it doesn't interfere with the way things have always been; software technicians in the Silicon Valley--many of Indian or Chinese descent--try to bring neighborhood to a virtual borderless world (even as their parents are cursing Sikhs, or debating about Mao Zedong). As James Gleick describes in his sobering new book Faster, a man with a watch knows what time...
Center of the World New York City: "If you can make it there..." Rivals: Silicon Valley, Calif., and its playground San Francisco; Shanghai, Asia's once and future boomtown...
...team at Bell Labs invented the transistor, which had the ability to take an electric current and translate it into on-off binary data. Thus began the digital age. Robert Noyce and Jack Kilby, a decade later, came up with ways to etch many transistors--eventually millions--onto tiny silicon wafers that became known as microchips...
...becoming a millionaire from a pre-eBay start-up, Omidyar was captivated by the still nascent Internet. Living in Silicon Valley, where companies were going public daily, he was troubled by how imperfectly the financial markets seemed to be operating. "Institutions and large investors had all the inside information," he says. "What I wanted to do was create a marketplace where everyone had access to the same information." Out of this democratic impulse, the clunky website that would eventually grow into eBay was born...
...plan was to give myself a week to order, always starting online but resorting to 800 numbers in a pinch, find a middle ground between ordering the totally exotic (alligator meat) and the reliably prosaic (ham), and default to vendors in California when in doubt, figuring those geeks in Silicon Valley surely have figured out how to stuff a turkey through a modem...