September 12, 1958
Jack Kilby demonstrates the world’s first integrated circuit to his colleagues at Texas Instruments (TI). From Texas Instruments’ website:
Jack Kilby’s first working integrated circuit consisted of a transistor, several resistors, and a capacitor on a sliver of germanium less than half an inch long. It was a rough device by any standard. But as his oscilloscope screen showed, it worked. Kilby often remarked that if he’d known he’d be showing the first working integrated circuit for the next 40-plus years, he would’ve “prettied it up a little.”…
The door to advancements in semiconductor electronics had opened nine years earlier, when Bell Labs introduced the transistor. Bell’s transistor replaced big, expensive, fragile and power-hungry vacuum tubes. By the mid-1950s, they were making inroads into consumer products and military applications.
Still, the transistor had its own disadvantages. Some applications required thousands of transistors to be hand-wired into circuits, with an equally large number of traditional components. The work was time-consuming, costly and jeopardized reliability.
Another problem – what engineers called “the tyranny of numbers” – also existed. The sheer number of a system’s interconnected transistors and other devices prevented progress. Their size and weight often precluded their use in many devices, including airborne military applications. And if one component failed, the entire system could be compromised.
Engineers worldwide hunted for a solution. TI mounted large-scale research efforts and recruited engineers from coast to coast, including Jack Kilby in 1958. At the time, TI was exploring a design called the “micromodule,” in which all the parts of a circuit were equal in size and shape. Kilby was skeptical, largely because it didn’t solve the basic problem: the number of transistor components.
While his colleagues enjoyed a two-week summer hiatus, Kilby, a new TI employee without any accrued vacation time, worked alone on an alternative in his TI lab. TI had already spent millions developing machinery and techniques for working with silicon, so Kilby sought a way to fabricate all of the circuit’s components, including capacitors and resistors, with a monolithic block of the same material. He sketched a rough design of the first integrated circuit in his notebook on July 24, 1958.
Two months passed before Kilby’s managers, preoccupied with pursuing the “micromodule” concept, gathered in Kilby’s office for the first successful demonstration of the integrated circuit.
Kilby’s invention made obsolete the hand-soldering of thousands of components, while allowing for Henry Ford-style mass production. Although the semiconductor industry initially greeted the integrated circuit with skepticism, the U.S. military’s use of the chip in airborne computers in the 1960s firmly positioned the technology as the new backbone of electronics systems.
And the rest is history. The impact Kilby’s invention has made in solving some of the world’s key problems is immeasurable.
Jack Kilby received the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his part in the invention of the integrated circuit."
September 12, 1991
Sony introduces the Data Discman, a handheld computer that can operate on small compact discs. Price: $550.
September 13, 1983
The Osborne Computer Corporation declares bankruptcy. The Osborne I, the first portable computer, was designed by company founder Adam Osborne. It weighed twenty-four pound, had a five-inch display, 64KB of memory, a modem, two 5¼-inch floppy disk drives, and cost $1,795.
September 14, 1956
IBM announces the 305 and 650 RAMAC (Random Access Memory Accounting) “data processing machines,” incorporating the first-ever disk storage product. The 305 came with fifty 24-inch disks for a total capacity of 5 megabytes, weighed 1 ton, and could be leased for $3,200 per month.
In 1953, Arthur J. Critchlow, a young member of IBM’s advanced technologies research lab in San Jose, California, was assigned the task of finding a better information storage medium than punch-cards. Visiting a number of customers, Critchlow learned that punch-card equipment performed well when the processing of information could be done in batches or sequentially stored information but became problematic when random access was needed.
Inventory control was such an activity. In warehouse operations, for example, each order typically required several cards to be manually located, removed from a stack of cards, the inventory information updated, and the updated cards returned to their original locations. To facilitate this activity, drawers of cards were set out on work tables so that several people could access cards from the same file. This manner of organizing and processing information, widely known as the “tub file,” was time consuming and error-prone.
The IBM project’s staff evaluated every existing storage technology in an attempt to find the best technological solution to the loss of productivity and poor quality associated with “tub files.” In addition to superior capacity and reliability, the storage technology eventually selected, magnetic disks, could provide random access to information. A new method (encoded in software) for finding stored information when its physical location on the disk was unknown, ensured the success of the new way to store, organize, and share business records.
Announced on September 4, 1956, the IBM 350 Disk Storage Unit came with fifty 24-inch disks and a total capacity of 5 megabytes; its first customer was United Airlines’ reservations system. Incorporated into the 305 and 650 RAMAC (announced ten days later), it promised, as the IBM press release said, “that business transactions will be completely processed right after they occur. There will be no delays while data is grouped for batch processing. People running a business will be able to get the fresh facts they need, at once. Random access memory equipment will not only revolutionize punched card accounting but also magnetic tape accounting.” Later, it was exhibited in the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, where visitors could query “Professor RAMAC” using a keyboard and get answers in any of ten languages. This public relations coup heralded a day when millions of people would access and retrieve information from the largest tub file ever assembled – the World Wide Web.
The RAMAC became obsolete within a few years of its introduction as the vacuum tubes powering it were replaced by transistors. Today, disk drives still serve as the containers for almost all digital information, but solid state drives (flash memory) used in mobile devices are growing fast, replacing disk drives even in today’s successors of the RAMAC.
Whatever form the storage takes, IBM created in 1956 new markets and businesses based on fast access to digital data. As Seagate’s Mark Kryder reminded us in 2006: “Instead of Silicon Valley, they should call it Ferrous Oxide Valley. It wasn’t the microprocessor that enabled the personal video recorder, it was storage. It’s enabling new industries.”
September 15, 1947
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is founded as the Eastern Association for Computing Machinery at a meeting at Columbia University in New York. The notice for the first meeting of the association stated: "The purpose of this organization would be to advance the science, development, construction, and application of the new machinery for computing, reasoning, and other handling of information."
September 18, 1998
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is formed as a California non-profit corporation to oversee a number of Internet-related tasks previously performed directly on behalf of the U.S. Government.
