Locator: 50951MICROCHIP.
The "lay-reader" needs to read these two books concurrently:
- The Story of Semiconductors, John Orton, c. 2004; notes here; and,
- Palo Alto, Malcolm Harris, c. 2023/2024, notes here.
Query:
From Malcom Harris' 2024 book this quote in chapter 3.2:
This chapter is concerned with the technological, commercial, and ultimately geopolitical developments that bridged the gap between de Forest's Federal Telegraph triode and the microchips of Silicon Valley.
It's a much shorter distance than you might imagine.
I've not read the chapter yet, but it certainly sounds like this history is going to rhyme with the history of Jensen Huang and his pivoting from gaming to AI following the Covid lockdown. Thoughts?
Reply:
how does one go from light bulbs to computers?
Lee de Forest's Audion triode
microwave technology, David Starr Jordan, Palo Alto
footnote, page 248
Colossus
Enigma
the mistake: Germany did encrypt their messages before putting them into Enigma
ENIAC, University of Pennsylvania, first Colossus upgrade
Fred Terman returning home, to Palo Algo:
Stanford area's young stars deployed for war tech work in one way or another:
Litton to ITT in Newark
Hewlett to the US Army Signal Corps
Fred Terman to the RRL in Cambridge
Shockley to the Anti-Submarine Warfar Operations Research Group
the Varians to Sperry Gyroscope in New York
Hansen to MIT
Dave Packard was needed at home to keep Hewlett-Packard running
HP
Bud Hawkins, chief sound engineer for Walt Disney, who placed the first big HP order (p. 251)
movie Fantasia
see footnote, page 251
The tube's potential was limited; the replacement called Palo Alto home.
The Junction
p.259: Bell Labs announced the "grown-junction transistor" (or "transistor") in the summer of 1951. I was born in the summer of 1951. Wow.
Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley.
p. 261: best quote of the book -- "But Shockley is the founder of Silicon Valley the way a pile of excrement is the founder of a garden." I either read that quote for the first (and only) time here or I read it elsewhere.
Gordon Moore, one of Shockley's best hires.
Reading a paragraph on page 261, one gets the feeling that the tech industry moved from California (1950s) to Texas (2020s).
Shockley -- Beckman --> Terman.
p. 262: the community was one military-industrial-academic transistor block: the Solid State.
"The traitorous eight," labeled by Shockley, included Robert Noyce, Eugene Kleiner, Julius Blank, Gordon Moore, others. -- p. 262
In progress.
