Word: silicones
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...thanks to the transistor and the silicon chip, the computer has been reduced so dramatically in both bulk and price that it is accessible to millions. In 1982 a cascade of computers beeped and blipped their way into the American office, the American school, the American home. The "information revolution" that futurists have long predicted has arrived, bringing with it the promise of dramatic changes in the way people live and work, perhaps even in the way they think. America will never be the same...
Created at the University of Pennsylvania, ENIAC weighed 30 tons and contained 18,000 vacuum tubes, which failed at an average of one every seven minutes. The arrival of the transistor and the miniaturized circuit in the 1950s made it possible to reduce a room-size computer to a silicon chip the size of a pea. And prices kept dropping. In contrast to the $487,000 paid for ENIAC, a top IBM personal computer today costs about $4,000, and some discounters offer a basic Timex-Sinclair 1000 for $77.95. One computer expert illustrates the trend by estimating that...
...anyone who wanted to make transistors, and the scramble was on to profit from them. William Shockley, one of the transistor's three inventors, returned to his California home town, Palo Alto, to form his own company in the heart of what would become known as Silicon Valley. In Dallas, a young, aggressive maker of exploration gear for the oil industry, Texas Instruments, had already hired away another Bell Labs star, Gordon Teal, and was churning out the little gadgets. So were old-line tube makers such as General Electric, RCA, Sylvania and Raytheon. Much of their production went...
...Instruments' Jack Kilby and Fairchild Semiconductor's Robert Noyce (one of eight defectors from Shockley's firm whom he scathingly called the "traitorous eight") had the same brainstorm. Almost simultaneously, they realized that any number of transistors could be etched directly on a single piece of silicon along with the connections between them. Such integrated circuits (ICs) contained entire sections of a computer, for example, a logic circuit or a memory register. The microchip was born...
Designers kept cramming in more and more transistors. Today, hundreds of thousands can be etched on a tiny silicon chip. The chips also began incorporating more circuits. But even such so-called large-scale integration had a drawback. With the circuits rigidly fixed in the silicon, the chips performed only the duties for which they were designed. They were "hardwired," as engineers say. That changed dramatically in 1971, when Intel Corp., a Silicon Valley company founded by Noyce after yet another "defection," unveiled the microprocessor. Designed by a young Intel engineer named Ted Hoff, it contained the entire central processing...