Insights from Chapter 1
#1
The idea that changed the world was conceived by Jack Kilby at the height of summer, when everyone else was on vacation. It was an idea of cosmic dimensions, and it would eventually win Kilby the Nobel Prize in Physics.
#2
In the 1950s, Americans were excited about the future, and magazines were happy to feed that appetite. The major breakthroughs in biology, genetics, and medicine were still a few years away, but in electronics, the late fifties saw some marvelous innovation almost every month.
#3
The idea to create a smaller, more efficient computer chip was proposed by Jack Kilby and his colleagues in the electronics business. They knew that if they didn’t develop this new idea, someone else would, and they were worried that someone else might be Texas Instruments.
#4
In 1959, Bob Noyce, a physicist and engineer, started a company called Fairchild Semiconductor that produced improved versions of transistors and other mechanical devices. He had a loquacious nature, and he often needed somebody to listen to his ideas and point out the ones that couldn’t possibly work.
#5
The monolithic idea was designed to solve the problem of heightened expectations. It was not an unprecedented phenomenon in technological history. A breakthrough leads to a burst of optimistic predictions about the bright new world ahead, but then problems arise that make that rosy future unobtainable.
#6
The transistor, invented by William Shockley, Walter Brattain, and John Bardeen of Bell Labs, was a godsend to the electronics industry. It eliminated all the bugs of the vacuum tube in one fell swoop.
#7
By 1953, The Engineering Index, an annual compendium of scholarly monographs in technical fields, listed more than 500 papers on transistors and related semiconductor devices.
#8
The design limitations were not inherent in the transistors or other components. They stemmed from the basic design structure of all electric circuits. The designers could draw up plans for exotic communications and computer circuits, but it was impossible to build them.
#9
The electronics industry had come head-to-head with the implacable limit of human hand labor by the 1950s. The only way to connect all the parts was by hand, which was expensive, time-consuming, and inherently unreliable.
#10
The search for a solution to the numbers problem was a top priority for the electronics community in the 1950s. The basic thrust of miniaturization was to make electronic components extremely small, thus reducing the overall size and weight of complex electronic devices.
#11
The Tinkertoy business tended to exacerbate the tyranny because circuits made on such a small scale were more likely to have faulty connections. To enhance reliability, the designers tried to build radios with extra circuits built in.
#12
The central concept of computer operations is that the machines operate extremely fast. Speed is the computer’s secret weapon. If computers did not work as fast as they do, no one could justify the time and materials required to build them.
#13
The limits of computing speed were the travel time of electronic signals through a circuit, which was limited by the speed of light. To increase computing speed, it was necessary to reduce the distance the messenger pulses had to travel. But smaller circuits meant decreased capacity.
#14
The monolithic idea was an engineering solution to the tyranny of numbers. It reduced the numbers to one: a complete circuit would consist of just one part, a single block of semiconductor material containing all the components and interconnections of the most complex circuit designs.