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Non-Tech : Kirk's Market Thoughts -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TigerPaw who wrote (27159)	1/27/2026 6:52:55 PM
From: Kirk ©	Respond to of 27167

Small world, eh? It sounds like Shockley was the Musk of his day... brilliant but hard to work for. Bill and Dave get credit for starting "Silicon Valley" I guess but it was with a vacuum tube audio oscillator that was made for Walt Disney to make his "Fantasia" movie. It was the start of smart Stanford students building something in their Palo Alto garage (now a landmark) for the HP company founded in 1939. That was well before the transistor was invented. When WW2 started, Bill Hewlett served as a U.S. Army officer (eventually a lieutenant colonel) in the Army Aviation Ordnance department, Dave Packard managed the company's production in California. share.google hewlettpackardhistory.com I believe the "silicon" in Silicon Valley started when some of the guys who worked for Shockley left to found Fairchild. Some of their employees were hired by the "Opto Electronics" division or OED to match integrated circuits with optical electronic devices. My first full time boss was from Fairchild along with a few other mentors in our small group. Their first products were "opto couplers" which were like fiber optic links that only went 2mm... to basically start the internet by connecting products with wires that were at different ground potentials, or could get zapped by lightning or ESD. I was hired when they took those products to the next level by connecting products between buildings with "current loops". They also started plastic fiber when I was hired to connect TVs or car electronics. We still use these descendants today to connect TVs to receivers if you have a fancy HiFi setup. Anyway, our small group eventually grew into what is called today "Broadcom" and they still sell a product I made my fame with by designing both the data sheet and actual circuits inside in the 1980s. The fab that made the chips inside is long gone... it was with 2" bipolar wafers when I started!... but the product lives on I think because it was perfect for isolation inside cruise missiles to get data from one end of the missiles to the other and not have static buildup blast the guidance computers. The progress is still mind blowing... Really good summary here: en.wikipedia.org BTW, when I started at UC Berkeley School of Engineering in 1975 the campus computer we had used discrete transistors and we used IBM punch cards to program it. If you left out a comma, the printer would spit out 25 pages of error messages so you could tell EECS students by the reams of printer paper we used to do homework on before transferring it to more expensive paper we had to pay for.

To: TigerPaw who wrote (27159)	1/27/2026 6:59:46 PM
From: Kirk ©	Respond to of 27167

I forgot the details over time.... Kirby at TI invented germanium integrated circuits while Noyce at Fairchild (and later Intel) did the same with silicon in what is now the Silicon Valley. en.wikipedia.org Jack Kilby, an employee at TI, invented the integrated circuit in 1958.[26] Kilby recorded his initial ideas concerning the integrated circuit in July 1958, and successfully demonstrated the world's first working integrated circuit on September 12, 1958.[27] Six months later, Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor (who went on to co-found Intel) independently developed the integrated circuit with integrated interconnect, and is also considered an inventor of the integrated circuit.[28] In 1969, Kilby was awarded the National Medal of Science, and in 1982 he was inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame.[29] Kilby also won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics for his part of the invention of the integrated circuit.[30] Noyce's chip, made at Fairchild, was made of silicon, while Kilby's chip was made of germanium. In 2008, TI named its new development laboratory "Kilby Labs" after Jack Kilby.[31]