Flush from the prosperity of the late fifties, the United States entered the 1960s with more of a sense of manifest destiny than ever before. Having established itself as the world's leading superpower, the U.S. stood at the threshold of a period of economic expansion and global sociopolitical influence. Nothing buoyed that sense of destiny more than the nation's technological superiority. We had Ed Sullivan on our color TVs. We had a telephone network that actually worked. We had surfboards, Barbie dolls, little red Corvettes, and jukeboxes full of 45s. Life was pretty good.
Yet growing civil unrest, escalating political tension with the eastern bloc, and the spectre of military conflict with Communism in the jungles of southeast Asia posed withering challenges to the very fabric of society. The country soon found itself in turmoil as traditional values were challenged by a generation whose creed was to question authority and everything else its elders held sacred.
The tone for the decade was set by the youngest elected president in U.S. history. Recognizing that the Soviet Union's early lead in the conquest of space posed a serious threat to American technical and military superiority, John F. Kennedy wasted little time in seizing the technological high ground. His brash declaration that the U.S. would win the space race by landing men on the moon and returning them safely to Earth before the decade was out amounted to a bold challenge to America's engineering community.
When Neil Armstrong called his step onto the lunar surface "one giant leap for mankind," he wasn't wrong. But the electronics industry made its own giant leaps during the tumultuous sixties, ones that would lay the foundation for a worldwide revolution in mass communication and computing. Integrated circuits (ICs), digital logic, and improvements in linear devices combined to create a communications infrastructure that would result in Marshall McLuhan's "global village," a world made vastly smaller by the changes wrought through microelectronics.
As the 1950s were the decade of the discrete transistor, the sixties were dominated by the IC. After being brought to market in 1961 by Fairchild and Texas Instruments, ICs quickly became the backbone of a broad range of military systems, consumer products, communication gear, and just about everything else. Their proliferation was aided in no small part by a government eager to foster technology development by the private sector.
By mid-decade, the domination of ICs was so apparent, and the progress in integration so stunning, that Intel co-founder Gordon Moore was moved to boldly predict that ICs would double in complexity every 18 months. An oft-forgotten caveat to what became known as Moore's Law is that Moore himself only expected this rate of growth in IC complexity to hold out for 10 years. The caveat, it would turn out, was the only thing Moore got wrong.
Early IC families emphasized digital logic. A host of logic types sprang up from various semiconductor manufacturers, each seeking to establish market dominance. Resistor-transistor logic (RTL) had strong support, as did diode-transistor logic (DTL). Into the mix came transistor-transistor logic (TTL) as well as emitter-coupled logic (ECL). Each had its strengths and weaknesses, some being faster and others more tolerant of noise. The upshot was that competition was good for the industry and even better for designers, who reveled in the broad choices available to them as they fashioned increasingly complex and clever digital circuits.
A latecomer to the logic world was complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology, introduced by RCA in 1968. Once some of the fabrication difficulties were overcome, CMOS devices delivered much lower power consumption. As a result, they helped pave the way for later generations of high-density memories as well as the first microprocessors.
The prevalence of digital logic called for a new wave in test equipment. First introduced with vacuum tubes in the late fifties, the function generator caught on when it was transistorized in the early sixties. Yet another advancement came with frequency synthesizers, which brought the accuracy demanded by the faster signal transitions of evolving ICs.
Long before America had the moon clearly in its sights, NASA's space program was a major contributor to, and partner of, the electronics industry's efforts to literally "go global" with its technology. Early efforts ushered in a new era in communications with the use of artificial satellites as relay stations. In 1960, an orbiting 100-ft sphere of aluminized Mylar plastic called Echo 1 facilitated the first transcontinental telephone call via satellite by bouncing a call from New Jersey to California.
Just a few months after John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth, another orbiting vehicle made history of its own. Launched on July 10, 1962, the Telstar communications satellite took its place in the firmament as the first privately owned satellite (AT&T financed its construction and launch). That very night, the orbiting satellite handled its first telephone call, television program, and photo facsimile transmission.
Although electronics were making their presence felt dramatically in the communications realm, it's interesting to note that the crews of manned spaceflights during the sixties had little or no aid from on-board computers. Glenn's Mercury spacecraft, for example, flew without an on-board computer of any kind. The two-man Gemini orbital missions carried computers with about 4 kwords of memory. The Apollo lunar flights had computers with all of 32 kwords of memory both in the command and lunar modules. This all stands as testimony to both the "Right Stuff" of NASA's astronauts and the engineering acumen of its technical staffs.
But while the space program's reliance on computing may have been slow to take hold, the developments in computing technology came fast and furious. Digital computers, born just over a decade earlier, would go through their awkward adolescent stages during the sixties. Inelegant inputs, displays, and packaging would later mature into sleek and sophisticated desktop machines.
Click here for several examples of the special photos in this picture album.
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