Paradigm Shifts

However, at a time when IBM and the Soviet government declined to develop the personal computer, hobbyists like the members of the California Homebrew Computer Club resolved to do it by themselves. It was a conscious ideological decision, influenced by the 1960s counterculture with its anarchist ideas of power to the people and libertarian distrust

The 4044 founded Intel’s decades-long prominence in microchip design that led to the first personal computers (the relatively expensive, slow and heavy desktops of the late 1970s and early 1980s) and portable electronics ranging from mobile phones (the first costly designs of the late 1980s) to laptops, tablets, and smartphones.

For Scaff and Theurer—and, in time, the rest of the solid-state team at Bell Labs—one way to think of these effects was that purity in a semiconductor was necessary. But so was a controlled impurity. Indeed, an almost vanishingly small impurity mixed into silicon, having a net effect of perhaps one rogue atom of boron or phosphorus inserted among f

He would acknowledge that building devices like chess-playing machines “might seem a ridiculous waste of time and money. But I think the history of science has shown that valuable consequences often proliferate from simple curiosity.”3 “He never argued his ideas,” Brock McMillan says of Shannon. “If people didn’t believe in them, he ignored those p

Bill’s audio oscillator represented the first practical, low-cost method of generating high-quality audio frequencies needed in communications, geophysics, medicine, and defense work. The audio oscillator was to become the Hewlett-Packard Company’s first product.