Robert Noyce's planar transistors and ICs drove reliability and performance up, and costs down! Moore's Law was one of the amazing phenomena of the last 50 years. Remember when one transistor cost $8? Now you can buy 250 million transistors in a RAM for that price. Still, there are those of us who observe that one good op amp is worth more than 1000 microprocessors....
What if a lunar lander had gotten to the moon, but the electronics failed and they couldn't take off? That would not have been a good year for a lot of people. I suspect that people's confidence in electronics would not have recovered from THAT for a long while. I met astronaut Buzz Aldrin recently, and he agreed that it would've been a real challenge to try to get that vehicle off the moon with just a slide rule. He was very pleased when the whole system (all built by the lowest bidder) really worked.
As volumes grew and prices dropped, the temptation to manufacture electronic equipment—TVs and radios and transistors—overseas grew just too hard to resist. Prices dropped further. But U.S. manufacturing and engineering jobs have been declining for a long time. Sigh.
So now we've got all these inexpensive, reliable, planar transistors and ICs. What did they lead to? Cheaper (digital) computers, smaller computers, personal computers, laptop computers, programmable calculators, and even information appliances—all of which have more computing power than the first (ENIAC) digital computers. I don't like computers for many uses, but they sure are handy for word processing. I certainly don't want to fool around with vacuum-tube portable radios, calculators, or computers. No analog word processors or hand-set type in printing presses for me, either.
"Hey, Pease, don't you think the Internet is a great invention?" Well, you don't want to hear my REAL comments on that. I'll just tell you a relevant quote from a wise man: "Many people think that information is knowledge. It isn't." I rest my case.
Does the view of the past tell us a lot about the future? What is at our back as we continue to row our rowboat?
Where is electronics going next? Will Moore's Law continue to extrapolate the shrinking transistors and costs into the indefinite future? Maybe not. But engineers will keep competing to invent new circuits and systems, just not at exactly the same logarithmic expansion rate!
Will digital radios be better than old radios? We shall see. Personally, I have never heard any claims for digital radio that I was impressed with, not to mention digital TV.
What the heck is an "information appliance?" My bosses think a lot of people will want those. I think it's a "seamless" integration of web, e-mail, electronic toilets, and automated refrigerators that tell us when our milk is going out of date. Or, maybe it predicts when the head-gasket on my car will blow out. I'll wait and see. I don't HAVE any head-gaskets on my VWs!
All for now. / Comments invited!
RAP / Robert A. Pease / Engineer
rap@galaxy.nsc.com—or:
Address:
Mail Stop D2597A
National Semiconductor
P.O. Box 58090
Santa Clara, CA 95052-8090
P.S. Comprehensive information on the WOM, one of the greatest inventions of the century, is accessible at: http://ganssle.com/misc/wom.html and www.ariplex.com/tina/tsignet1.htm.
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