Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

by Chris Miller

During the Great Depression, America’s Works Progress Administration, looking to employ jobless office workers, set up the Mathematical Tables Project. Several hundred human “computers” sat at rows of desks in a Manhattan office building and tabulated logarithms and exponential functions. The project published twenty-eight volumes of the results of complex functions, with titles such as Tables of Reciprocals of the Integers from 100,000 Through 200,009, presenting 201 pages covered in tables of numbers. Organized groups of human calculators showed the promise of computation, but also the limits of using brains to compute.

When Bell Labs held a press conference in June 1948 to announce that its scientists had invented the transistor, it wasn’t easy to understand why these wired blocks of germanium merited a special announcement. The New York Times buried the story on page 46.