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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.
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)
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.
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.
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.