The Chip Quotes

“Other than showing up in white tie and tails for the lavish awards ceremonies—the event is so fancy that even the traffic cops outside wear tuxedos, and the sterling silver laid out for the ensuing banquet is never used for any other function—a Nobel laureate’s only unavoidable duty during prize week is to deliver a lecture. Jack Kilby’s Nobel lecture in physics took place in a classically Scandinavian lecture hall, all blond wood and sleek modern furniture, on the campus of Stockholm University. Jack was introduced by a Swedish physicist who noted that “Dr. Kilby’s” invention had launched the global digital revolution, making possible calculators, computers, digital cameras, pacemakers, the Internet, etc., etc. Naturally, Jack wasn’t going to let that go unanswered. “When I hear that kind of thing,” he said, “it reminds me of what the beaver told the rabbit as they stood at the base of Hoover Dam: ‘No, I didn’t build it myself, but it’s based on an idea of mine.’” Everybody liked that joke, so Jack quickly added that he had borrowed the story from Charles H. Townes, an American who won the physics prize in 1964.”
― T.R. Reid, The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution

“In any case, it was a satisfying development, not least because it provided a whole new world of human endeavor to learn about. “Getting into management was just enormously exciting,” Noyce recalled a few years later. “Because, first of all, I didn’t know a damn thing about it, so that your learning rate goes up very, very rapidly. But secondly, management does become the focal point for all the information in the organization. Well, the guy who has the information has the power. . . . It’s a very satisfying thing, particularly coming from a place where you’re looking at a narrow field so you don’t see the forest for the trees. And suddenly you’re sitting in a balloon looking down from branch to branch and . . . for the first time you can see the whole.”
― T.R. Reid, The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution

“Propagation delay,” like many other elements of microelectronic jargon, is a complex term for a simple and familiar phenomenon. Propagation delays occur on the freeway every day at rush hour. If 500 cars are proceeding bumper to bumper and the first car stops, all the others stop as well. When the first driver puts his foot back on the accelerator, the driver in the second car sees the brake lights ahead of her go off, and she, in turn, switches her foot from brake to accelerator. This switching action, from brake to accelerator, is then relayed down the chain of cars. If each driver has a switching time of just one second, the last car will have to wait 500 seconds—about 8½ minutes—because of the propagation delay down the line of traffic.”
― T.R. Reid, The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution

“For the Minuteman II missile, Texas Instruments had to design and produce twenty-two fairly standard types of circuits in integrated form; every one of those chips was readily adaptable to civilian computers, radio transmitters, and the like. A large number of the most familiar products of the microelectronic revolution, from the busy businessman’s pocket beeper to the Action News Minicam (“film at eleven”), resulted directly from space and military development contracts.”
― T.R. Reid, The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution

“The burgeoning government sales not only provided profits for the chip makers but also conferred respectability. “From a marketing standpoint, Apollo and the Minuteman were ideal customers,” Kilby said. “When they decided that they could use these solid circuits, that had quite an impact on a lot of people who bought electronic equipment. Both of those projects were recognized as outstanding engineering operations, and if the integrated circuit was good enough for them, well, that meant it was good enough for a lot of other people.” One of the major pastimes among professional economists is an apparently endless debate as to whether military-funded research helps or hurts the civilian economy. As a general matter, there seem to be enough arguments on both sides to keep the debaters fruitfully occupied for years to come. In the specific case of the integrated circuit, however, there is no doubt that the Pentagon’s money produced real benefits for the civilian electronics business—and for civilian consumers. Unlike armored personnel carriers or nuclear cannon or zero-gravity food tubes, the electronic logic gates, radios, etc., that space and military programs use are fairly easily converted to earthbound civilian applications. The first chip sold for the commercial market—used in a Zenith hearing aid that went on sale in 1964—was the same integrated amplifier circuit used in the IMP satellite.”
― T.R. Reid, The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution

“Government sales constituted 100 percent of the market for integrated circuits until 1964, and the federal government remained the largest buyer of chips for several years after that. The military had started funding research on new types of electric circuits in the early 1950s, when the tyranny of numbers first emerged. The problems inherent in complex circuits containing large numbers of individual components were particularly severe in defense applications. Such circuits tended to be big and heavy, but the services needed equipment that was light and portable. “The general rule of thumb in a missile was that one extra pound of payload cost $100,000 worth of extra fuel,” Noyce recalled. “The shipping cost of sending up a 50-pound computer was too high even for the Pentagon.” Further, space-age weapons had to be absolutely reliable—a goal that was inordinately difficult to achieve in a circuit with several thousand components and several thousand hand-soldered connections. When the Air Force ordered electronic equipment for the Minuteman I, the first modern intercontinental ballistic missile, specifications called for every single component—not just every radio but every transistor and every resistor in every radio—to have its own individual progress chart on which production, installation, checking, and rechecking could be recorded. Testing, retesting, and re-retesting more than doubled the cost of each electronic part.”
― T.R. Reid, The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution

“Two decades later, when the American semiconductor industry was facing an all-out battle with Japanese competitors, U.S. electronics companies complained loudly that Japanese firms had an unfair advantage because much of their development funds were provided by the government in Tokyo. On this point, the American manufacturers lived in glass houses. The government in Washington—specifically, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Defense Department—played a crucial role in the development of the American semiconductor industry. The Apollo project was the most glamorous early application of the chip, but there were numerous other rocket and weapons programs that provided research funds and, more important, large markets when the chip was still too expensive to compete against traditional circuits in civilian applications. A study published in 1977 reported that the government provided just under half of all the research and development money spent by the U.S. electronics industry in the first sixteen years of the chip’s existence.”
― T.R. Reid, The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution

“If you want to know why modern man has settled on a base-10 number system, just spread your hands and count the digits. All creatures develop a number system based on their basic counting equipment; for us, that means our ten fingers. The Mayans, who went around barefoot, used a base-20 (vigesimal) number system; their calendars employ twenty different digits. The ancient Babylonians, who counted on their two arms as well as their ten fingers, devised a base-12 number system that still lives today in the methods we use to tell time and buy eggs. Someday a diligent grad student doing interdisciplinary work in mathematics and the history of film may produce a dissertation demonstrating that the residents of E.T.’s planet use an octal number system; the movie shows plainly that E.T. has eight fingers. For earthbound humans, however, the handy counting system is base-10.”
― T.R. Reid, The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution

“The great breakthrough that permitted man to count far beyond 10 with just ten different symbols was the invention of this turning point—a concept that mathematicians call positional notation. Positional notation means that each digit in a number has a particular value based on its position. In a decimal number, the first (farthest right) digit represents 1’s, the next digit 10’s, the next 100’s, and so on. The number 206 stands for six 1’s, no 10’s, and two 100’s: Add it all up: and you get 206. This number, incidentally, demonstrates why mathematicians consider the invention of a symbol that represents nothing (i.e., the number 0) to have been a revolutionary event in man’s intellectual history. Without zero, there would be no positional notation, because there would be no difference between 26 and 206 and 2,000,006. The Romans, for all their other achievements, never hit on the idea of zero and thus were stuck with a cumbersome system of M’s, C’s, X’s, and I’s which made higher math just about impossible. With”
― T.R. Reid, The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution

“It wasn’t a sensation,” Kilby recalls dryly. There were about 17,000 electronic products on display at the convention (the Coliseum used a million watts of power daily during the gathering), and large numbers of them attracted more attention than the integrated circuit. There were hundreds of reporters on hand, and virtually all of them managed to miss the biggest story of the week. In its special issue on the convention, Electronics magazine, which was supposed to recognize important new developments in the field, offered breathless reports on such innovations as a backward -wave oscillator and a gallium arsenide diode, but made no mention of the integrated circuit. In a wrap-up two weeks later, Electronics devoted a single paragraph to Texas Instruments’ new “match-head size solid-state circuit.”
― T.R. Reid, The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution

“The integrated circuit made its debut before electronic society at the New York Coliseum on March 24, 1959. The occasion was the industry’s most important yearly get-together—the annual convention of the Institute of Radio Engineers. Texas Instruments had managed, in the nick of time, to turn out a few chips that had no flying wires, and there was a lavish display at the TI booth featuring the new “solid circuits.” There was also a lavish prediction (which we know today to have been a massive understatement) from TI’s president, who said that Jack Kilby’s invention would prove to be the most important and must lucrative technological development since the silicon transistor. Nonetheless, the new circuit-on-a-chip received a frosty reception.”
― T.R. Reid, The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution

“The award of an integrated circuit patent to Noyce evoked consternation, but not outright panic, at Texas Instruments. Kilby and his lawyers, after all, were veterans of the patent game; they knew that some applications move through the Patent Office faster than others, and that it is not particularly unusual for the second version of an invention to be the first patented. This happens so often, in fact, that the government has a special procedure—called an interference proceeding—and a special board—the Board of Patent Interferences—to consider the claims of inventors who find themselves in Kilby’s position. The basic rule governing an interference is that priority prevails—that is, whichever inventor can prove to have had the idea first gets the patent.”
― T.R. Reid, The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution

“Before he could start writing Kilby’s application, though, Mosher had to resolve a fundamental tactical question. Anyone who applies for a patent has to decide whether he needs it for offensive or for defensive purposes—whether, to use lawyers’ favorite metaphor, he wants his patent to be a sword or a shield. The decision usually turns on the novelty of the invention. If somebody has a genuinely revolutionary idea, a breakthrough that his competitors are almost sure to copy, his lawyers will write a patent application they can use as a sword; they will describe the invention in such broad and encompassing terms that they can take it into court for an injunction against any competitor who tries to sell a product that is even remotely related. In contrast, an inventor whose idea is basically an extension of or an improvement on an earlier idea needs a patent application that will work as a shield—a defense against legal action by the sword wielders. Such a defensive patent is usually written in much narrower terms, emphasizing a specific improvement or a particular application of the idea that is not covered clearly in earlier patents. Probably the most famous sword in the history of the patent system was the sweeping application filed on February 14, 1876, by a teacher and part-time inventor named Alexander Graham Bell. That first telephone patent (No. 174,465) was so broad and inclusive that it became the cornerstone—after Bell and his partners had fought some 600 lawsuits against scores of competitors—of the largest corporate family in the world. In the nature of things, though, few inventions are so completely new that they don’t build on something from the past. The majority of patent applications, therefore, are written as shields—as improvements on some earlier invention. Some of the most important patents in American history fall into this category, including No. 586,193, “New and Useful Improvements in Transmitting Electrical Impulses,” granted to Guglielmo Marconi in 1898; No. 621,195, “Improvements in and Relating to Navigable Balloons,” granted to Ferdinand Zeppelin in 1899; No. 686,046, “New and Useful Improvements in Motor Carriages,” granted to Henry Ford in 1901; and No. 821,393, “New and Useful Improvements in Flying Machines,” granted to Orville and Wilbur Wright in 1906.”
― T.R. Reid, The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution

“From the inventor’s viewpoint, the flaw with the trade secret laws is that they apply only to purposeful stealing of an idea. They do not prevent anybody from marketing a product that he has invented on his own, even if an earlier inventor has been selling the same product for years. Lacking a patent, Coca-Cola would have no recourse against a company selling exactly the same drink if the second firm could prove in court that its chemists had been messing around with sugar, flavorings, and cola nuts and just happened to hit on the precise formula that Coca-Cola uses. The holder of a patent, in contrast, can go to court to stop any competitor from selling the same product, even if the competitor developed the product completely on his own. The strategic decision facing every inventor, then, is whether he wants twenty years of the stronger protection provided by a patent, or permanent protection under the trade secret laws against only those who deliberately steal the idea.”
― T.R. Reid, The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution

“The patent expressly guarantees the inventor “the right to exclude others from making, using, or selling” the idea for the twenty-year life of the patent. The patent holder can, if he chooses, issue licenses to others to make, use, or sell the idea. The license fees can bring in large sums of money. If anybody tries to market the patented product without obtaining a license, the inventor can go into federal court to get an injunction and money damages. Not a bad deal at all for the inventor. In exchange for those benefits, though, the patent holder has to reveal all the secrets of his success. The patent law says that an inventor must provide “a written description of the invention, and of the manner and process of making and using it, in . . . full, clear, concise and exact terms.” The inventor and his company might have expended a dozen years and a hundred million dollars perfecting the idea; once a patent is granted, anybody in the world can acquire the plans—full, clear, concise, and exact—from the Patent Office for $3. If, for example, John S. Pemberton had applied for a patent for the formula he whipped up in his backyard in Atlanta one day in the mid-1880s, the product that he invented—a soft drink that he named Coca-Cola—would have entered the public domain in 1903, when the patent expired. Anybody in the world would have been free from that day forward to brew and sell the drink without paying a penny to the Coca-Cola Company. But Pemberton kept his formula unpatented, and thus secret. Even without a patent, Coca-Cola has been able to defend its formula under a body of law known as trade secret protection, which makes it illegal to copy deliberately somebody else’s commercial idea.”
― T.R. Reid, The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution

“Noyce recalled that the group had some slight qualms about running their own business, but these doubts were easily overcome by “the realization, for the first time, that you had a chance at making more money than you ever dreamed of.” The dream, as it happened, came true. Even by high-tech standards, that $500 turned out to be a spectacular investment. In 1968 the founders sold their share of Fairchild Semiconductor back to the parent company; Noyce’s proceeds—the return on his initial $500 investment—came to $250,000. Noyce and his friend Gordon Moore had by then found another financial backer and started a new firm, Intel Corporation (the name is a play on both Intelligence and Integrated Electronics). Intel started out making chips for computer memories, a business that took off like a rocket. Intel’s shares were traded publicly for the first time in 1971—on the same day, coincidentally, that Playboy Enterprises went public. On that first day, stock in the two firms was about equally priced; a year later, Intel’s shares were worth more than twice as much as Playboy’s. “Wall Street has spoken,” an investment analyst observed. “It’s memories over mammaries.” Today, Intel is a multibillion-dollar company, and anybody who held on to the founding group’s stake in the company is a billionaire several times over.”
― T.R. Reid, The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution

“Noyce recalled that the group had some slight qualms about running their own business, but these doubts were easily overcome by “the realization, for the first time, that you had a chance at making more money than you ever dreamed of.” The dream, as it happened, came true. Even by high-tech standards, that $500 turned out to be a spectacular investment. In 1968 the founders sold their share of Fairchild Semiconductor back to the parent company; Noyce’s proceeds—the return on his initial $500 investment—came to $250,000. Noyce and his friend Gordon Moore had by then found another financial backer and started a new firm, Intel Corporation (the name is a play on both Intelligence and Integrated Electronics). Intel started out making chips for computer memories, a business that took off like a rocket. Intel’s shares were traded publicly for the first time in 1971—on the same day, coincidentally, that Playboy Enterprises went public.”
― T.R. Reid, The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution

“In Robert Noyce’s office there hung a black-and-white photo that showed a jovial crew of young scientists offering a champagne toast to the smiling William Shockley. The picture was taken on November 1, 1956, a few hours after the news of Shockley’s Nobel Prize had reached Palo Alto. By the time that happy picture was taken, however, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories was a chaotic and thoroughly unhappy place. For all his technical expertise, Shockley had proven to be an inexpert manager. He was continually shifting his researchers from one job to another; he couldn’t seem to make up his mind what, if anything, the company was trying to produce. “There was a group that worked for Shockley that was pretty unhappy,” Noyce recalled many years later. “And that group went to Beckman and said, hey, this isn’t working. . . . About that time, Shockley got his Nobel Prize. And Beckman was sort of between the devil and the deep blue sea. He couldn’t fire Shockley, who had just gotten this great international honor, but he had to change the management or else everyone else would leave.” In the end, Beckman stuck with Shockley—and paid a huge price. Confused and frustrated, eight of the young scientists, including Noyce, Moore, and Hoerni, decided to look for another place to work. That first group—Shockley called them “the traitorous eight”—turned out to be pioneers, for they established a pattern that has been followed time and again in Silicon Valley ever since. They decided to offer themselves as a team to whichever employer made the best offer. Word of this unusual proposal reached an investment banker in New York, who offered a counterproposal: Instead of working for somebody else, the eight scientists should start their own firm. The banker knew of an investor who would provide the backing—the Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation, which had been looking hard for an entrée to the transistor business. A deal was struck. Each of the eight young scientists put up $500 in earnest money, the corporate angel put up all the rest, and early in 1957 the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation opened for business, a mile or so down the road from Shockley’s operation.”
― T.R. Reid, The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution

“Double diffusion made possible, for the first time, the mass production of precise, high-performance transistors. The technique promised to be highly profitable for any organization that could master its technical intricacies. Shockley therefore quit Bell Labs and, with financial backing from Arnold Beckman, president of a prestigious maker of scientific instruments, started a company to produce double-diffusion transistors. The inventor recruited the best young minds he could find, including Noyce; Gordon Moore, a physical chemist from Johns Hopkins; and Jean Hoerni, a Swiss-born physicist whose strength was in theory. Already thinking about human intelligence, Shockley made each of his recruits take a battery of psychological tests. The results described Noyce as an introvert, a conclusion so ludicrous that it should have told Shockley something about the value of such tests. Early in 1956, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories opened for business in the sunny valley south of Palo Alto. It was the first electronics firm in what was to become Silicon Valley.”
― T.R. Reid, The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution

“Scientists and engineers tend to divide their work into two large categories, sometimes described as basic research and directed research. Some of the most crucial inventions and discoveries of the modern world have come about through basic research—that is, work that was not directed toward any particular use. Albert Einstein’s picture of the universe, Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin, Niels Bohr’s blueprint of the atomic nucleus, the Watson-Crick “double helix” model of DNA—all these have had enormous practical implications, but they all came out of basic research. There are just as many basic tools of modern life—the electric light, the telephone, vitamin pills, the Internet—that resulted from a clearly focused effort to solve a particular problem. In a sense, this distinction between basic and directed research encompasses the difference between science and engineering. Scientists, on the whole, are driven by the thirst for knowledge; their motivation, as the Nobel laureate Richard Feynman put it, is “the joy of finding things out.” Engineers, in contrast, are solution-driven. Their joy is making things work. The monolithic idea was an engineering solution. It worked around the tyranny of numbers by reducing the numbers to one: a complete circuit would consist of just one part—a single (“monolithic”) block of semiconductor material containing all the components and all the interconnections of the most complex circuit designs. The tangible product of that idea, known to engineers as the monolithic integrated circuit and to the world at large as the semiconductor chip, has changed the world as fundamentally as did the telephone, the light bulb, and the horseless carriage. The integrated circuit is the heart of clocks, computers, cameras, and calculators, of pacemakers and Palm Pilots, of deep-space probes and deep-sea sensors, of toasters, typewriters, cell phones, and Internet servers. The National Academy of Sciences declared the integrated circuit the progenitor of the “Second Industrial Revolution.” The first Industrial Revolution enhanced man’s physical prowess and freed people from the drudgery of backbreaking manual labor; the revolution spawned by the chip enhances our intellectual prowess and frees people from the drudgery of mind-numbing computational labor. A British physicist, Sir Ieuan Madlock, Her Majesty’s Chief Science Advisor, called the integrated circuit “the most remarkable technology ever to hit mankind.” A California businessman, Jerry Sanders, founder of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., offered a more pointed assessment: “Integrated circuits are the crude oil of the eighties.” All”
― T.R. Reid, The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution

“Over time, Jack came to realize that if he approached a problem correctly, worked at it long enough, and refused to let initial failures get him down, he could find a solution. One”
― T.R. Reid, The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution

“All the watchmaker needs is a mechanism to count the back-and-forth oscillations—and counting is one of the simple tasks that binary logic gates can perform. In the digital watch a logic gate called a JK flip-flop counts the vibrations of the crystal.”
― T.R. Reid, The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution

“The warmth and the soft glow of the tubes also attracted moths, which would fly through ENIAC’s innards and cause short circuits. Ever since, the process of fixing computer problems has been known as debugging.”
― T.R. Reid, The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution