If one looks at the last 50 years of engineering boom-and-bust cycles and correlates them with the “stealth” technologies that emerged during those periods, one can see an encouraging pattern: breakthrough technologies take root during the crises and eventually transform the industry. Often, few people initially grasp these technologies or their potential. It’s also regrettably demonstrable that the actual pioneers have rarely been the ones to reap the big rewards.
TAILFIN RECESSION
Start a little more than 50 years ago, in 1958, right after Sputnik and about the time I built my first radio (a Knight “Space Spanner” from Allied Radio). Across the auto industry, tailfins grew to what would be their maximum useless size, yet auto sales still took a big hit (Fig. 1). Some corny industry ads exclaimed “You ‘auto’ buy now!” Consumer and wholesale prices rose across the board.
According to economists, that recession didn’t really end until early 1961, when President Kennedy kicked off the race to the moon. But in terms of engineering, the recovery and ensuing boom was in part due to earlier government investments in technology education (see “Give ’Em a Buck”).
This boom was also the first to build on the root technology that powered the latter half of the 20th century, the semiconductor IC. This technology goes back to the work of Jacobi, Dummer, Darlington, Kilby, and Noyce (Fig. 2). Kilby and Noyce were probably the first engineers who had a clear vision of where IC technology might lead. Not me. I must have been seduced by the warm glow of the 12AT7 in that Space Spanner.
I remember reading about Kilby’s work in 1959, when I was in high school, and naively wondering whether it would be possible to scale passives as readily as transistors. Actually, it was a long time before we moved beyond through-hole assembly, but passives scaled as rapidly as clock rates and rise times required them to.
Another technology from this era took longer to become pervasive—directsequence spread-spectrum (DSSS) modulation. One day in a senior EE circuits class, our TA, who was doing his PhD research at Bell Labs, came to class apparently lacking a planned lesson. Somewhat orthogonally to what we had been covering, he delivered a brilliantly clear lecture on autocorrelation and its application to signal processing.
He was so articulate, I could have replicated that lecture for at least several days afterward. (It wasn’t going to be on the final.) I recognized the concept nearly 20 years later when it reared its head in two applications in particular that have since became pervasive, GPS and wireless networking.
AEROSPACE CRASHES
I had to set that lecture aside until IC capabilities caught up with the theory. Meanwhile, by the time I finished college in 1966, the aerospace boom had reached a crescendo, and I moved to Los Angeles to get a piece of the action—for a time.
Economists don’t label it a recession. But in late 1969, if you were an engineer working anywhere in the aerospace or defense industries, it sure felt like one. The folks in Los Angeles who had sent Eagle to the moon took it hard. Seattle, where Boeing lost the C5A jumbo military transport to Lockheed-Georgia and had to shut down the 2707 SST in 1971, took it really hard.
The company went from a peak of 100,800 employees in 1967 to 38,690 in April 1971. That month, two real estate agents with a taste for irony put the message “Will the last person leaving Seattle —Turn out the lights” on a billboard a few blocks down Pacific Highway from Sea-Tac airport.
By that point, the worst was past for many EEs. Boeing’s payroll was up to 53,300 by October 1971. Down in L.A., I had turned in my Yellow Cab taxi-driver’s hat and gone to work for an aircraft antenna company. However, few anticipated the stock market crash that started in January 1973 and lasted until December 1974. The Dow lost more than 45% (after picking up 15% in 1972). That’s before factoring in the effects of the Arab oil embargo. Things were worse overseas.
While aerospace crashed, never to recover the glamour it had during the 1960s, the microcontroller tiptoed into our lives. Intel released the 4004 in late 1971. I never saw one of the Busicom four-function handheld calculators that used it, but I was impressed when a hotshot consultant showed us salaried grunt engineers his new HP35 in 1972. (It was early enough that his calculator had the famous “2.02 ln ex bug.” That’s the keypad entry in reverse-Polish notation, and the result on the calculator was truncated to “2.”) The HP35 CPU was a custom chipset, though, oriented to the calculator’s stack architecture (Fig. 3).
This was, in a word, awesome. At the time, engineers at the antenna company I worked for performed their heavy computations using a single Teletype KSR-33 to access Tymnet’s mainframe. We entered data offline, creating tapes on the Teletype’s built-in punch, and generally spooled output to the punch, which was faster than the TTY. We’d make readable printouts offline.
Actually, Tymnet was more useful than the HP-35 for big, repetitive jobs. (There are lots of iterations involved in modeling a horn antenna.) But the idea of the HP-35 —that you could run rings around a slide rule and eliminate order-ofmagnitude errors (while adding many digits of false precision) on a (nearly) affordable unit you could slip into your pocket—was striking.
Of course, desktop scientific calculators already existed. In its air-data computer division, my previous employer had not one but three Nixie-tubed Wang electronic slide rules for all of its engineers to share. But they were the size of the clackety-clack mechanical Marchant calculators, relics of the Manhattan Project, they replaced. In contrast, the HP-35 was half the size of a Star Trek tricorder!
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