Word: siliconized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...past 40 years were designed to do one thing at a time. Following the basic concept conceived by John von Neumann and his colleagues in 1945, they consist of a single, high-speed central processing unit connected to an array of memory cells. "The two-part architecture keeps the silicon devoted to processing wonderfully busy," says Hillis. "But this is only 2% or 3% of the silicon area. The other 97% (the memory bank) sits idle...
...with processors, 65,536 of them. Acting in concert, they can handle massive amounts of data. Equally important, each processor is assigned its own tiny memory bank. This means that processing and memory, once separated by a narrow channel, are now integrated within a fingernail-size piece of silicon. Moreover, each processor is directly or indirectly connected to every other one through what is in effect a miniature telephone system with 4,096 switching stations and 24,576 trunk lines that can be programmed and reprogrammed without actually changing the computer's wiring...
...bright glow is rising above Silicon Valley's gloomy horizon. In a computer industry plagued by layoffs and flat revenues, Sun Microsystems of Mountain View, Calif., has achieved phenomenal growth. Founded only four years ago, Sun boosted sales from $8 million in fiscal 1983 to $115 million in 1985. Over the same period, annual profits surged from $654,000 to $8.5 million. Run by Scott McNealy, 31, Andreas Bechtolsheim, 30, and William Joy, 31, a trio of workaholic wunderkinder, the company shows signs of staying power in a business in which success is often fleeting...
...repeals the current provision that allows taxpayers to exclude from taxation 60% of the long-term profits they make when they sell stocks, real estate and other assets. Instead, such gains would be taxed as ordinary income. Doing away with the capital-gains break could hurt entrepreneurial companies like Silicon Valley's electronics upstarts, which depend on venture-capital financing. Reason: those potential backers would lose an important incentive if their profits were taxed at a higher rate. Says California Senator Alan Cranston, who plans to fight the committee's change: "It would put a tremendous obstacle in the path...
...probably just as well, because the voters' hands and babies would be exhausted by the crowd of 13 candidates running in California's June 3 Republican primary for the Senate seat now held by Democrat Alan Cranston, 71. The candidates are wildly diverse, ranging from Zschau, a millionaire Silicon Valley Congressman, to Eldridge Cleaver, the former Black Panther leader; from right-wing TV Commentator Bruce Herschensohn to Supply-Side Economist Arthur Laffer to indicted-then-unindicted Congresswoman Bobbi Fiedler...