Word: siliconized
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That Digital Revolution is now transforming the end of this century the way the Industrial Revolution transformed the end of the 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...
Driving all this is the microchip. The high-tech industry, which accounted for less than 10% of America's growth in 1990, accounts for 30% today. Every week a Silicon Valley company goes public. It's an industry that pays good wages and makes both skilled and unskilled workers more efficient. Its products cost less each year and help reduce the prices in other industries. That, along with the global competition that computers and networks facilitate, helps keep inflation down...
...empowering to each individual, marked not only by economic growth but also by a spread of knowledge and freedom and true community. That's a daunting task. But it shouldn't be much harder than figuring out how to etch more than 7 million transistors on a sliver of silicon...
Intel has ceased being just a Silicon Valley wonder. It has become a weather vane for an entire digital economy, a complete ecosystem of drive manufacturers, software houses and Web programmers whose businesses depend on escalating PC growth. Because Grove and his firm control the blueprints of the PC, he is in the unique position of being able to tell customers what to do. Intel sets release dates for new chips, dictating the pace of the computer industry with the confident aplomb of fashion designers raising or lowering hemlines. It's the sort of ironfisted market grip that rarely exists...
...answer, of course, turned out to be what gave Silicon Valley its name. Gordon Moore (who ran Fairchild's research arm and later became Grove's mentor as CEO of Intel) believed you could store those charges with an integrated circuit made by sandwiching metal oxide and silicon into an electrical circuit called an MOS transistor. Unlike trickier semiconductors, silicon is both a wonderful conductor of electrical charges and a nearly bottomless sink for heat, meaning it doesn't melt down as you push electrons under its surface at nearly light speed. Because it is made from refined sand, silicon...