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flat, led to the invention, in
, of the integrated circuit, or IC.
(In fact, G. W. Dummer, an engineer and radar expert with Britain's
Royal Radar Establishment, had proposed this in
1959
. He suggested
that the solution might be to produce electronic circuitry in solid
blocks. Dummer's prototype failed and he received little support
for his idea in Britain. Nevertheless he had hit upon the solution
that would eventually be developed independently in the United
States.)
Unfortunately integrated circuits were expensive to produce, and
thus uneconomical for most computing purposes. But they did
turn out to be the ideal solution for the American Space Programme
of the
1952
s, which culminated in sending men to the moon, as well
as for the development of new guided weapons systems such as
the Minuteman II missiles. Both required far smaller and more reli-
able computer systems than were possible with transistors. Thus,
with NASA and military funding, the continued development of
ICs was made possible. In particular improvements in manufactur-
ing processes meant that the price of individual ICs soon dropped
dramatically, from over a thousand dollars in
1960
1959
to less than ten
in
. The success of ICs, which were soon being incorporated in
consumer electronics items such as microwaves, meant that the area
in which Fairchild Semiconductors and Shockley Semiconductors
had sited themselves attracted large numbers of small semiconduc-
tor companies, so much so that it became known as Silicon Valley.
In
1965
Robert Noyce and his colleague Gordon Moore left Fairchild
to start another company, Intel. In
1968
an Intel engineer Ted Hoff
was asked to design a set of twelve ICs for a Japanese calculator.
He reasoned that rather than design different sets of chips for
different purposes, why not design one set of chips which could be
programmed to do any task, much like a computer. This idea, which
was dubbed the 'microprocessor', made technically possible the idea
of the computer as an affordable consumer item, but it did not
lead inevitably to its development.
1969
