Understanding how we got ‘here’ plays an important role on our efforts to imagine and project the future. In that spirit here’s a lecture given by Michael Riordan at the Computer History Museum addressing the broad efforts toward microminiaturization of the early 1950s.
The computer chip we know today initially emerged from Cold War demands for improved reliability, performance, and miniaturization of electronics systems. The later 1950s witnessed diverse efforts to pack components into tiny modules and to integrate multiple components in a single slice of semiconductor material. Fierce technological competition between these different approaches to microcircuitry — from Tinkertoys to Molecular Electronics to Solid Circuits — resulted in the planar integrated circuit of today.
(via Computer History Museum on YouTube)
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