Insights from Chapter 7
#1
The first integrated circuits were so hard to produce that it took nearly two years for them to be available for sale. They were more expensive than conventional circuits, and there was no market to push down the price.
#2
The G N system was crucial to the moon shot, and the computer that was needed to control it was built from integrated circuits. The American semiconductor industry was developed thanks in large part to government funding.
#3
In the late 1950s, the military began funding research on new types of electric circuits. The problems inherent in complex circuits containing large numbers of individual components were particularly severe in defense applications.
#4
The military services learned of Kilby’s new monolithic circuit as soon as the people at Texas Instruments had tested the first chip and found that it worked. The Air Force was the first to fund the project, but only because their colonel was losing faith in the cherished notion of molecular electronics.
#5
The chip industry benefited from the Apollo program and military contracts. The first chip sold for the commercial market was used in a Zenith hearing aid in 1964, and it was the same integrated amplifier circuit used in the IMP satellite.
#6
The semiconductor industry was able to produce chips at a cheaper rate due to the government’s willingness to buy them in quantity. The industry developed the negative pressure fabrication room, which vacuumed air out of the room to prevent dust from contaminating the chips.
#7
The semiconductor industry has followed Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors on the most advanced integrated circuits will double every eighteen months or so. The law has held true all the way to the twenty-first century.
#8
The semiconductor industry has produced the greatest productivity gains in American industrial history. A graph comparing prices and capacity during the first forty years of the chip’s existence makes a nearly perfect X: the price curve angles sharply downward over time, and the capacity curve angles straight up.
#9
The integrated circuit was perfectly suited to the digital computer, but it was not obvious to computer manufacturers when the chip first came on the market. The chip was a revolutionary concept that rendered all existing machines obsolete.
#10
The computer industry in the 1960s was divided into two parts: logic circuitry, which is what made the computers work, and memory units, which stored the data. The most expensive thing about core memory was the labor cost for stringing all those iron rings on the net.
#11
The computer industry has its own version of Parkinson’s Law. It is sometimes stated in pure Parkinsonian terms, Data expands to fill the memory available to hold it. In other words, there is no such thing as enough memory.
#12
The semiconductor industry, faced with an ever-expanding supply of a lifetime product, chose the right answer in the late 1960s. They found new applications and markets for their products, and began selling their chips into the American home.