The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce

A quixotic intellectual troubadour, he has prosecuted a series of discrete visions united only by a potent sense of curiosity and a provocative optimism.

The origins of the current great surge, the fifth since the end of the eighteenth century, dates back to 1971 when the first microprocessor was developed by Intel, a company founded three years earlier by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore[46]. Thanks to the integration of all the key components of a computer on a single chip, the microprocessor would g

Or electrical engineer Claude Shannon, who launched the Information Age thanks to a philosophy course he took to fulfill a requirement at the University of Michigan. In it, he was exposed to the work of self-taught nineteenth-century English logician George Boole, who assigned a value of 1 to true statements and 0 to false statements and showed tha

And yet Kelly would say at one point, “With all the needed emphasis on leadership, organization and teamwork, the individual has remained supreme—of paramount importance. It is in the mind of a single person that creative ideas and concepts are born.”40 There was an essential truth to this, too—John Bardeen suddenly suggesting to the solid-state gr

once a fundamental breakthrough has been achieved, the center of gravity quickly shifts from a handful of elite researchers to an army of tinkerers—engineers with just enough expertise to apply the technology to different problems.

technologists imagine that computer velocity conveys computer intelligence, that if you shuffle the electrons fast enough you can confer consciousness and creativity on dumb machines.