The 50 year old microchip still going strong
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday dear microchip
Happy Birthday to you
There, that’s better. Yes, the microchip is celebrating half a century since it was born. Or at least since it was first demonstrated by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments on the 12th of September 1958.
Who would have thought that the strip of germanium with a single transistor, along with the other components, glued to a glass slide and measuring a whopping great 7/16ths of an inch by a 16th of an inch, would go on to be used in, well, just about everything?
Probably not Jack Kilby, after all he invented it because had was a newbie with time on his hands. Having not long joined Texas Instruments Kilby was not allowed to go on holiday like everyone else, so he spent his time attempting to solve a problem that had been bugging him. That problem was how to efficiently, in terms of both application and cost, connect a large number of components in elaborate circuits.
Of course, Kilby was not only the inventor of the microchip, he also invented the first hand-held calculator. I guess it should also be mentioned that he won the Nobel Prize for Physics back in the year 2000.
The humble, if that is the right word considering the statistics, microchip has gone of to truly great things. The semiconductor industry looks like producing in excess of 267 billion integrated circuits this year alone, rising to more than 330 billion within 3 years.
Not bad going for a fifty year old…
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
Loading ...Make a comment
Tag cloud
Archives
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
- August 2006
Most commented posts
- Cuil frozen out: market share drops to next to nothing
20 comments
- Windows XP: the invincible OS
- Gatecrashing the WiFi hotspot party
- The 24 year old software that is still going strong
- Home workers are sick
- Big Brother Apple
- Spear phishing Catch 22 for Salesforce.com
- Dumbest phisher in history revealed
- Is BT misleading consumers with Option 2 broadband?
- Why ecommerce fails
Highest Rated Blog Posts
- Why ecommerce fails (100%)
- Betting on Hubdub technology (100%)
- Chinese whispers as government implicated in UK hack attacks (100%)
- Crimeware toolkit targets 10,000 trusted sites (100%)
- Black Hat risk to migrating VMs (100%)
- Tough on cyber crime, tough on the causes of cyber crime (100%)
- Firefox 3, Beta 4, Enhancements 900, Tested 5 (100%)
- Slowly slowly catchee Government IT monkey (100%)
- Who needs another set of web standards? (100%)
- The 6.5 billion quid hello (100%)