Slashdot Mirror
Integrated Circuit Inventor Jack Kilby Dead at 81
geekotourist writes " Jack Kilby , inventor of the integrated circuit, one winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics (Robert Noyce died in 1990), died June 20th after a brief battle with cancer. In 1958 he invented the foundation for a trillion dollar industry as a substitute for going on vacation." Update: 06/22 02:03 GMT by T : Kilby was 81, not 91 as the headline originally indicated.
God rest his soul, for without him, Slashdot would not be!
I'm a little confused.
How have computers required us to live by their schedules? I have yet to use a computer which demands its users to accord to a strict schedule. If you are talking about IT, it's the same with any industry which requires maintenance; machines break at unfortunate times.
I think it's pretty presumptuous to assume what a scientist wants or doesn't want. The asocialism that you describe is hardly something inherent to computers, but rather around the culture of the modern business world.
He probably thought of it as a way to increase efficiency and ultimately reduce our workload.
More realistically, he was a smart person, and realized that humans like and need to work. Or should we all model ourselves after Paris Hilton?
Increased workload? Less human contact? Bullshit. The microchip brought us manufacturing automation and advanced communications, amongst many other things. Faster and more transparent communication has brought us more individual involvement in world events.
The problem is not in the computer, it is in your mind.
Well that's just it. Computers allow for more work to be done in the same amount of given time. As such, if you wish to remain competitive in the work force so to stay employeed, we must use these tools to maintain an advantage.
Basically, we are slaves to ourselves. We always have been, only we have become more efficient at it.
Life is not for the lazy.
The truth of the matter is that education is only one of many prerequisites for earth-shattering technical success. The other components are an environment that encourages free thinking without the shackles of tradition (e.g. ancestor worship in China and the caste system in India) and a living environment which is comfortable (i.e. where people do not lie, cheat, and steal).
Another giant is Carver Mead. He is a "hick" boy who is regarded as the father of neural networks down at Caltech. He too did not have an educational pedigree but became a professor at Caltech.
Yet, another example is Robert Floyd. He only had a bachelor of science. He never obtained a graduate degree but managed to reach the rank of full professor of computer science at Stanford University. Furthermore, he contributed significantly to the concept of proving algorithms to be correct.
Just as Professor Norman Matloff has stated over and over, the USA has no need for H-1B workers from India or China. America already has the homegrown talent. Even if, perchance, India should have a genius or two, they would be trapped in bad environments that would stifle their creativity just as Chinese and Indian society have done for nearly a millenium.
Half the comments so far are saying something to the effect of the world would be a completely different place if Kilby didn't invent the integrated circuit. Slashdot wouldn't exist, we wouldn't have personal computers, etc. Do you people honestly think that Jack Kilby was the ONLY person who could have possibly envisioned integrated circuits? Do you people honestly think that we would still be building computers with discrete components if it wasn't for Kilby? I'm not saying that what he did wasn't a major accomplishment and the integrated ciruit did indeed change the world. However, it is quite foolish to think that we would not have integrated circuits today if Jack Kilby hadn't invented them.
and patents were 'for real'. People like this is what the patent system was made for, not the bunch of subverters that are out there right now switching fields and patenting the obvious, including mathematical formula and strings of bits.
thank you mr. Kilby, for a career and a future.
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God rest his soul, for without him, Slashdot would not be!
First, I mean no disrespect to Kilby -- he clearly was an innovator of the first order and an accomplished inventor. But to say that without him, slashdot would not have happened is to misread the broad sweep of history in general and the history of chips in particular. So many great ideas bubble out of the context of the time, not the minds of some unique person. Eras are primed for particular inventions. Even the IC was essentially invented by two independent inventors-- don't forget Robert Noyce who also "invented" the chip. Kilby's chip may have come a few months earlier, but Noyce's chip was on silicon.
At worst, without Kilby, the IC would have been delayed half a year and all of us with have slightly lower post-counts.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Nowadays he'd be fired for using company resources to do side projects that management had already disapproved.
The most famous American tech companies used to be pretty good about this sort of thing. I bought a Tektronix employee handbook from the late Fifties on eBay awhile back, and it's a jaw-droppingly enlightened piece of work. Read it, and you'll wish you owned a time machine and a bus ticket to Portland, Oregon.
People speak in hushed tones about Google's "spend one day per week on your personal project" policy as if it's a radical innovation. They're like, who are those guys, a bunch of Communists?
Now... imagine how radical it sounded in the 1950s when Tektronix actually gave their engineers the key to the company storeroom on the weekends and a polite request, conveyed in the employee handbook, not to abuse the privilege.
The famous "HP Way", originating 30 or 40 years before Carly showed up, was another expression of the same idea: give your employees enough rope and they'll pull your company in directions you never would have imagined.
Nowadays, Hewlett-Packard sells ink for a living, Texas Instruments earns more from its legal department than from its engineering department, and policies like Google's sound like something from a Star Trek script. It seems that the best we can hope for is that the American technology industry as a whole relearns what it knew fifty years ago.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
While it's sad to see him go, I have to wonder if his legacy isn't the easing of mankind's stress levels but accelerating it to the stratosphere. Computers have done wonders in improving our productivity, but at the cost of making humans part of the machine.
We spend a smaller portion of our monthly budget on food than ever before, even as our average caloric intake has climbed nicely. While the proportion of money spent by the average household has not changed much, the square footage of the average house has shot through the roof.
The actual amount of time spent at work, on average, has been fairly steady, to perhaps dropping some. What we can buy, and what we can do with our income is generally more and better than ever.
Sorry. Go back to 1950. Houses are small, often unheated, or heated only with fireplaces. Air conditioning was still reserved for the "upper classes". TVs, if they existed, were black and white. Telephone coverage was spotty. Racism is/was alive and well. Food was expensive, unless you happened to be a farmer, and then, only certain types of food (what you grew) was cheap.
I wouldn't want to go back, and neither would you. Go back to your relaxed, comfortable computer desk, and enjoy the comforts that they only dreamed of in 1958, and shut up.
Computers have done wonders in improving our productivity, but at the cost of making humans part of the machine. We live according to the schedule of the computer rather than the other way around.
Oh, man. This is just so much ball cheese. Take a look at manufacturing jobs in the 1950s. (You know, manufacturing, that's now highly automated, often done by robots controlled by microprocessors?) An assembly line is essentially a giant machine, often blocks long, comprised of mechanical, electrical, and human parts. Can you imagine seeing this massive bohemoth of a machine, surrounding you, towering above you, two or three stories high? Who's "part of the machine"? Who's lifestyle is more regimented - yours, or theirs?
I write software that manages independent study programs for schools. The software I write enables teachers to teach, in the field, in homestudy programs by automating the generation of legally required progress reports and compliance paperwork. Rather than reducing flexibility, my software empowers teachers with more flexibility and power, saving as much as 10-20 hours per month per teacher doing administrative paperwork, so that they can... teach!
Additionally, I usually work at home, on the couch, with my kids - it's a majority of my worktime. I get a successful career, I get to fly around to visit with clients with whom I have a good, close, friendly relationship, and I do it armed with my laptop and my (digital) cell phone.
The effect isn't one of making either myself or the teachers live to the schedule of the computer, it's freeing us all from any set schedule whatsoever!
I don't imagine that Kilby thought it would lead to less human contact, less face to face time, and less free time for everyone.
Tell this to the ex-manufacturer bloke who now sells insurance, or runs a small business. Small businesses represent more of the US GNP than ever before. Small businesses are, by definition, close to their customers, and thus have more intimate relationships between the staff and the customers.
Next time, have at least some information to comment on before you do so, eh? For a good, economic and environmental "State of the World", I highly recommend "The Skeptical Environmentalist" by Bjorn Lomborg.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
i've read a couple of posts saying if kilby didn't invent the IC then someone else would have. maybe, however, he gets the credit (like newton and calculus without a formal proof). thank you jack kilby and i hope his family is doing well. you gave us a new way to view the world and if history is fair, you will be part of the academic and historical legacy for many, probally hundreds of years to come
It had a high reputation in the 1960s that Arthur C. Clarke sited HAL's invention there.