Slashdot Mirror
Integrated Circuit Is 50 Years Old Today
arcticstoat writes "Today marks fifty years since the first integrated circuit, or microchip, was demonstrated by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments on 12 September 1958. The original chip might not be much to look at, but then Texas Instruments admits that Kilby often remarked that if he'd known he'd be showing the first working integrated circuit for the next 40-plus years, he would've 'prettied it up a little.' The integrated circuit itself was housed in a germanium strip on a glass slide, and it measured 7/16in by 1/16in. With protruding wires, and just containing a single transistor, some resistors and a capacitor, it's a primitive chip by today's standards, but it worked and successfully produced a sine wave on an oscilloscope screen at the demo. Technology hasn't been the same since."
IC your 50 years old...
Atheist: Buddhist in a Prius
We'll see you in court.
--RIAA
According to this, the IC is a phase shift oscillator which cranked out a 1.3 MHz signal upon application of power.
Yeah, but they fail to account for the fact that correlation != causation. Technology's been moving along at a fairly rapid pace since the 1800s; perhaps it's just a coincidence that integrated circuits came along around the same time electronics started taking off.
From TFA:
To commemorate Kilby's accomplishment and stimulate ingenuity, Texas Instruments will be canceling vacations for all of their employees.
With the hurricane coming to town, their facility seems like a fairly safe space compared to the vacation spots on the beaches in South Texas.
You're right. Correlation isn't causation. But correlation is nevertheless good EVIDENCE of causation. I'm sick and tired of people parroting "correlation is not causation" every time a correlation is used as evidence for causation.
correlation != coincidence as well.
Other coincidences abound, such as the fact that human flight became viable around the same time as the advent of the aeroplane.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
And electronics would have really taken off with lots of vacuum tubes.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
Wow, we have come so far since the discovery in Roswell!!!!!!
Why not just call it a chip? Because you don't want to give non-technical people the wrong idea - they don't really go very good with salsa.
You now owe Time Warner $10,000.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Indeed!
I'd add that correlation usually implies that there is some common cause which is a necessary condition of all the correlated events, even if it is not sufficient to cause all of them by itself.
People frequently loose sight of the fact that all "correlation != causation" is meant to indicate is that the common cause of correlated events is not required to be one the events themselves, but can be some other external event.
Whether the cause is bias in the measurement, direct/indirect causation, some remotely connected common causation, or whatever.. Correlation hardly _ever_ is simply coincidence.
For a laugh and some historical perspective, dig out the datasheet for a 555 timer. It's an ancient chip by any standards, but still extant. The designers were obviously rather proud of how many transistors this chip could replace (something like 25), and the datasheet is clearly bragging about this. In a modern context, this is pretty funny. Of course, designing a chip with that kind of lifespan is braggable.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
First of all, it was a joke, come on people.
Secondly, correlation is pretty bad evidence of causation without something else backing it up. Correlations happen all the time for many reasons. There are many orders of magnitude more good correlations than there are causal relationships.
Maybe not, but think of the Polar Bears. Global warming would have wiped the arctic off the map decades ago if we were still limited to 'valves'. But OTOH, iPods would just sound a lot better.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I was debating a coworker about the greatest invention of the 20th century, we both agreed that the miniskirt ranks higher than the transistor. It's interesting that they both came out around the same time.
If that's a microchip, a regular full sized chip must be about 8 foot long
I like SI too, but it isn't the be-all end-all of word formation. "Micro" is just the Greek word for "small" - it doesn't have to mean "exactly one millionth the size of a regular ...".
A "microscope" doesn't have to magnify things exactly one million times (most only do 10-400 fold), nor does it need to allow you to see things one micrometer in size (although some can). Likewise "microeconomics" doesn't imply that it deals with things exactly one millionth the size of "regular" economics.
So microchip doesn't mean "something exactly one millionth the size of a regular chip", nor should it have to. It's "micro" (that is small) compared to the non-integrated circuits which preceded it, and it's a "chip" (a small sliver) of semiconductor. It's a small chip ... a "microchip".
How about an analysis of those variables that have to be taken into account? That's a good way to back up a correlation that isn't in and of itself another correlation. There's experimentation. That's useful. Logic works too. In the case of IC, we can directly trace the history of electronics and determine that IC played a very large part in it.
Correlations can be used as supporting evidence, but they're weak to the point of ridicule by themselves. I can't believe this is even an argument on a forum of educated people. The scientific method, at its core, is a method used to remove the uncertainty from correlations in the data so that you can say with confidence that either the correlation in the data is a cause and effect relationship or that the experiment was set up improperly. Perhaps, instead of bitching about correlation not being accepted as evidence of causation, you should praise people for having the skepticism that's driven the scientific revolution of the past few centuries.
The TI invention was not what we would consider an "IC". It had components, but it wasnt practical to mass produce. Not even TI followed up on its development.
The real practical IC, with photoetched traces on a planar silicon substrate was developed by Fairchild.
Here's an interview with Hans Camenzind, the said desinger of the 555. I thought this part was interesting:
There are no patents on the 555. Signetics did not want to apply for a patent. You see, the situation with patents in Silicon Valley in 1970 was entirely different than it is now. Everybody was stealing from everybody else. I designed the 555 Signetics produced it, and six months, or before a year later, National had it, Fairchild had it, and nobody paid any attention to patents. The people at Signetics told me they didn't want to apply for a patent, because what would happen if they tried to enforce that patent, is the people from Fairchild would come back with a Manhattan-sized telephone book and say "These are our patents, now let's see what you're violating". It was a house of cards - if you blew on it, the whole thing collapsed.
I say teh same about my posts that git modded way up
Table-ized A.I.