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Part III – Hardware

From vacuum tubes to the transistor (1947), the integrated circuit and the microprocessor (1971), and the engineers behind them, from Shockley and Noyce to Faggin, Lynn Conway and Sophie Wilson. The eras run from IBM mainframes and DEC minicomputers through the Altair, the IBM PC and the home computer boom to GPUs, ARM and the chip foundries of today.

People & Breakthroughs

  • Gustav Tauschek: The Forgotten Inventor — the Viennese autodidact who invented drum memory (1932) and early OCR, and sold 169 patents to IBM
  • Helmut Hölzer — the glider pilot whose 1935 integrator became the V-2’s Mischgerät, the first computer to fly, and the first fully electronic analog computer; later NASA Marshall’s computation chief
  • The Transistor — Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain at Bell Labs, December 16, 1947
  • Bell Labs: The Idea Factory — transistor, Unix, C, information theory, and the laser from one monopoly’s research division
  • Jack Kilby and the Integrated Circuit — a summer alone in a lab; a Nobel Prize 42 years later
  • William Shockley — the junction transistor, the Nobel Prize, the company that put silicon in Silicon Valley and shipped nothing, and the eugenics campaign that ended his reputation
  • Robert Noyce and Fairchild Semiconductor — the planar process and the organizational DNA of Silicon Valley
  • Jean Hoerni and the Planar Process — the December 1957 notebook entry that left the oxide on, the 2N1613, Intersil, and schools in the Karakoram
  • Fujio Masuoka and Flash Memory — NOR in 1984, NAND developed “under the desk” in 1987, a $20,000 camera, a few-hundred-dollar bonus, and a settled lawsuit
  • Bob Widlar and Analog Integrated Circuits — the µA709, the bandgap reference, a sheep on the company lawn, and Silicon Valley’s wildest genius
  • Gordon Moore and Moore’s Law — the observation that became a self-fulfilling prophecy
  • Andy Grove and Intel — refugee, Intel CEO, and the man who bet everything on microprocessors
  • Federico Faggin and the Microprocessor — the 4004 designer who put the world’s first microprocessor on silicon in 12 months
  • Ross Freeman and the FPGA — the chip that wastes transistors on purpose: Xilinx, the XC2064 of 1985, and a patent granted four weeks before his death
  • Gene Amdahl and the System/360 — Amdahl’s Law and the plug-compatible mainframe competitor
  • Fred Brooks and the Mythical Man-Month — OS/360, the first great software disaster, and why adding people makes it worse
  • Seymour Cray and Supercomputing — the fastest computer in the world, six times, almost alone
  • Danny Hillis and the Connection Machine — 65,536 processors in a cube of blinking lights, Feynman on the router, and massive parallelism a few decades early
  • Gordon Bell: Architect of the Minicomputer — the UART, PDP-4 and PDP-6, the VAX strategy written in Tahiti, NSF’s network plan, the Bell Prize, MyLifeBits, and the Computer Museum
  • Bob Metcalfe and Ethernet — the network standard still connecting every wired device
  • Butler Lampson and Xerox PARC — the most prolific inventor at PARC: the Alto, laser printing, and a 1992 Turing Award
  • Chuck Thacker and the Alto — the engineer who built the Alto (1 March 1973), co-invented Ethernet, designed DEC’s Firefly and Microsoft’s tablet prototype, founded three labs’ hardware and never took a graduate degree
  • Chester Carlson — invented xerography alone in a rented room in Astoria (October 22, 1938), was turned down by more than twenty companies, and lived to see Haloid’s Xerox 914 (1959) and to give most of his $200 million away
  • Gary Starkweather — invented the laser printer at Xerox against his managers’ orders, escaped to PARC to build it, and later ColorSync at Apple
  • Joseph Jacobson — the MIT physicist behind E Ink: microencapsulated electrophoretic ink (1996 patent, 1998 Nature cover), the $100 million “radio paper” detour, Sony’s Librié and the Kindle, and the $450 million sale to its Taiwanese maker
  • Lynn Conway and VLSI — the Mead–Conway revolution that made chip design teachable, built in a second career after IBM fired her for transitioning
  • Bob Yannes and the SID Chip — a synthesizer on a chip in five months, the filter he ran out of time for, the Commodore 64 composers, and Ensoniq
  • Hardware Description Languages — Verilog over Christmas 1983, VHDL from the Pentagon, and logic synthesis turning text into gates
  • Sophie Wilson and ARM — designed the ARM instruction set at Acorn in 1985 with a team of three
  • David May — architect of the Inmos transputer and designer of occam, formal proof on the T800’s floating-point unit in 1987, and XMOS, the transputer argument at microcontroller scale
  • John Cocke and the IBM 801 — the first RISC, built at Yorktown from 1975 after a telephone switch was cancelled, kept secret for seven years, and sold badly as the RT PC
  • Hennessy and Patterson: The Quantitative Approach — Berkeley RISC and Stanford MIPS, the textbook that made architecture measurable, RAID, RISC-V, and the company that switched to its rival’s instruction set
  • William Kahan and IEEE 754 — the 8087 arithmetic that became the floating-point standard, the gradual-underflow fight with DEC, Kahan summation, and the extended precision the world discarded
  • Evelyn Berezin — a 1960s airline reservation system, the first standalone word processor, and a woman running the computer company that built it
  • Lee Felsenstein — Free Speech Movement arrestee, the Community Memory terminal in a Berkeley record shop (1973), Homebrew’s yardstick-wielding moderator, and designer of the Sol-20 and Osborne 1
  • Morris Chang and TSMC — invented the pure-play foundry model; made fabless chip design possible
  • AMD and the x86 Underdog — the second source that twice out-bet Intel: the 64-bit coup and Lisa Su’s Zen turnaround

Technologies & Eras