Crystal Fire: The Birth of the Information Age

Front Cover
W. W. Norton & Company, 1997 - Computers - 352 pages
It is hard to imagine any device more crucial to modern life than the microchip and the transistor from which it sprang. Every waking hour people of the world take their vast benefits for granted - in cellular phones, ATMs, wrist watches, calculators, computers, automobiles, radios, televisions, fax machines, copiers, stoplights, and thousands of other electronic devices. Without a doubt, the transistor is the most important artifact of the twentieth century and the "nerve cell" of our electronic age. Crystal Fire recounts the story of the transistor team at Bell Labs headed up by William Shockley who shared the Nobel Prize with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. While his colleagues went on to other research, Shockley grew increasingly obsessed with the new gadget. Eventually he formed his own firm - the first semiconductor company in what would become Silicon Valley, spawning hundreds of other businesses and a multi-billion-dollar industry. Above all, Crystal Fire is a tale of the human factors in technology - the pride and jealousies coupled with scientific and economic aspiration that led to the creation of modern microelectronics and ignited the greatest technological explosion in history.
 

Contents

BORN WITH THE CENTURY
11
THE REVOLUTION WITHIN
28
INDUSTRIAL STRENGTH SCIENCE
55
THE PHYSICS OF DIRT
71
THE FOURTH COLUMN
88
POINT OF ENTRY
115
MINORITY VIEWS
142
THE DAUGHTER OF INVENTION
168
SPREADING THE FLAMES
195
CALIFORNIA DREAMING
225
THE MONOLITHIC IDEA
254
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