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.
I now know who to blame my "misspent youth" on for living in the basement in the late '70's with my OSI C1P computer.
Thanks for everything!!!
Visualize Whirled P.'s
His name will forever be engraved in the J-K flip-flop. (That's right, J-K did not stand for John Kerry)
So long and thanks for all the chips.
That would be surreal. It makes me wonder if he was satified in the path his technology has taken... or just pissed about royalties.
I am billdar, and I approve this message.
From http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=528&e=1& u=/ap/20050622/ap_on_hi_te/obit_kilby
"Jack St. Clair Kilby was born in 1923 in Great Bend, Kan. His father was the owner of a small electric company, and Kilby became interested in radio tubes while listening to big band radio in the 1940s."
May he rest in peace.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
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.
Just to point out an interesting tidbit about his invention of the IC, he was a new employee at TI in 1958. While everyone else was on vacation he had to find something to work on, as he had no vacation time saved up yet. (In those days TI would normally shut down most operations for maintenance and most employees would take their vacation) As much as those around him told him that his idea would never work, he used his time to prove them all wrong.
(history is just about the only thing you actually learn in those training days when you first start a job at a company like Texas Instruments)
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.
He probably thought of it as a way to increase efficiency and ultimately reduce our workload. I suspect he had no such grandiose visions. A man who is skilled in and passionate about his work will change his world without meaning to, though rarely will the ripples be so large. Probably he was seriously geeking out over the coolness of it, wondering how to sell it to his new pointy-haired boss and avoid getting assigned to a crap job, yet mindful that this STILL wouldn't impress any chicks...
To steer this comment back on topic though, I'd like to thank Mr. Kilby for his tremendous accomplishment; the modern world owes much to your work (and of course to that of Mr. Noyce as well). I was at UIUC in 2000 when Jack Kilby (BSEE '47) won his Nobel Prize, and I remember the publicity at the time. He was recognized during halftime of a football game that fall- I swear he got more cheers than the team did any time that season.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
From the substitute for going on vacation article:
This guy was a true hacker! I wish I had the opportunity to meet him. Rest in peace Jack Kilby.
The bits on the bus go on and off... on and off... on and off...
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.
MP3 Search Engine
He attended a public institution and studied a subject, engineering
He attended University of Illinois at Urbabna Champaign... I don't know about 1947, but today, UIUC is a top engineering school. #4 according to the 2006 USNews ranking. Nobody in their right mind would suggest that you *can't* be successful without a good education, but an overwhelming majority of people who have made groundbreaking discoveries have.
free thinking without the shackles of tradition... living environment which is comfortable (i.e. where people do not lie, cheat, and steal)
*Sob* I never reaized I was living in this paradise filled with saints. But you're right... I just looked out of the window and noticed the faint halos around all my fellow american's heads. Dear George W. Bush. Thank you for your unrelenting honesty, for not shovelling taxpayer's money into the pockets of a few cronies, and for eschewing religous and traditional shackles and allowing science to grow unfettered.
Dude seriously though. Open your eyes a little. The US is being left behind in more fields than I can count. While we debate whether to teach Creationism in schools instead of evolution, an increasing fraction of significant breakthroughs these days are coming from Japan, South Korea and China. Funding agencies like NSF have had their budgets slashed to the point where researchers who's have several grants funded a year have been unable to get a single grant in the past several years. DARPA has decided to stop funding research that doesn't produce and "immediate military benefit". NASA is being forced to work on ambitious projects without being given adequate funds to pursue those without cancelling their science projects.
This administration is pursuing a dangerously short-sighted policy, and while people like you are waving flags and sticking bumper stickers on your SUVs proclaiming how great America is, the rest of the world is rapidly catching up. Once existing grants run out (and we're at the point where that's starting to happen), graduate school enrollments will plummet and the wonderful research instututes that have kept America on top all this time will effectively have their throats cut.
Blind patriotism like yours is counterproductive and dangerous.
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.
hey there from another ancient hacker!
:) But then again what else do ancient hackers do but code and split hairs on slash.
I believe it was called a thin-film integrated circuit, and it definitely qualifies as the first step in integration, it just did not push it all the way through, to put multiple components on a single die. There had been some thermally coupled transistors on a single die before that time but there were no interconnects between them, so they did not qualify as a circuit.
Intergrated Circuits have many components in a single carrier and as such Kilby's work definitely qualifies.
You're absolutely right though in that Noyce's device was much closer to what we consider to be a 'chip' nowadays, especially since he used silicon, instead of noisy Germanium.
Probably our current crop of smd's would look remarkably familiar along side one of those old thin film circuits.
It's splitting hairs though
MP3 Search Engine
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.
Jack Kilby is said to have invented the integrated circuit. This is not entirely correct for three reasons.
1) Jack Kilby simply jumpered wires around a semiconductor. At the same time and before at Fairchild, Bob Noyce produced a planar process that we use today. Subsequently, TI used Noyce's process, not Kilby's.
2) A lawyer at TI argued for years that Jack Kilby invented the IC. Fairchild was awarded the first patent for the IC, but eventually gave up. Since the lawyer won the case despite all of the evidence against Kilby, the Nobel committee should have included the lawyer in the Nobel prize. He is partly responsible for it.
3) If Intel (the eventual home of Noyce) were to claim that Noyce invented the IC, it would have given an expensive gift to Fairchild. Fairchild at one point could have sued Intel for all Noyce walked out with. It would create a mess. TI claimed all along that Kilby invented the IC. Corporate publicity won the day.