The Chip

October 8, 2001
In 1958, "before Chernobyl, before the Challenger rocket blew up, before the advent of Internet porn or cell phones that ring in the middle of the opera," when "`technological progress' still had only positive connotations," Jack Kilby had a good idea, but wasn't sure if his boss at Texas Instruments in Dallas would let him try it. In 1959, in what would become Silicon Valley, Robert Noyce had the same idea about overcoming "the numbers barrier" in electronics: "in a computer with tens of thousands of components... things were just about impossible to make," says Noyce. In his completely revised and updated edition of The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution, Washington Post reporter and columnist T.R. Reid (Confucius Lives Next Door) investigates these underappreciated heroes of the technological age and the global repercussions of their invention. The enormity of their accomplishment was fully recognized only in 2000, when Kilby won the Nobel Prize. 3-city author tour.

September 1, 2001
Since Reid wrote about the integrated circuit in 1985, a Nobel Prize has been awarded for the device, one of its inventors has died, and the computer revolution has changed the world. It's time for an update. What most attracted Reid to the subject was the total obscurity of the inventors--rivals Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce--compared with the ubiquity of their invention. After a run through the history of electronics, from the vacuum tube to the solid-state amplifier, Reid delineates the electronics landscape Kilby and Noyce surveyed as young engineers in the mid-1950s. Blocking progress was the "tyranny of numbers," so named because circuits were limited in size and reliability by the need for hand soldering. Kilby and Noyce independently devised the solution: manufacturing all the components of a circuit directly from a single block of semiconducting material. Their success begat patent fights, piles of dough for Kilby's Texas Instruments and Noyce's Intel, trade disputes with Japan, and in 2000 the Nobel Prize for Kilby. Reid covers it all with verve and clarity. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2001, American Library Association.)