Their hair grew long their shirts stayed untucked. Related StoryĪ new generation of computing innovators arrived in the Valley, beneficiaries of America’s great postwar prosperity but now protesting its wars and chafing against its culture. As computing power became greater and cheaper, digital innards replaced mechanical ones in nearly everything from cars to coffeemakers.
In 1965, semiconductor pioneer Gordon Moore, who with colleagues had broken ranks with his boss William Shockley of Shockley Semiconductor to launch a new company, predicted that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every year while costs would stay about the same. (Of course, there were also women playing key, though often unrecognized, roles.) Lanky engineers in white shirts and narrow ties turned giant machines into miniature electronic ones, sending Americans to the moon. The space race, especially after the Soviets beat the US into space with the launch of the Sputnik orbiter in late 1957, jump-started a silicon semiconductor industry in a sleepy agricultural region of Northern California, eventually shifting tech’s center of entrepreneurial gravity from East to West. Electronic data processing defined the American age of the Organization Man, a nation built and sorted on punch cards.
Colleges and universities churned out engineers and scientists. In a grim race for nuclear supremacy amid an optimistic age of scientific aspiration, government became computing’s biggest research sponsor and largest single customer. The strategic priorities of the Cold War drove rapid development of transistorized technologies on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
0 kommentar(er)
