Category Archives: High Tech History

A brief look at the 1977 Roland MC-8 MicroComposer Analog Sequencer and its lasting impact on musical composition

Posted on January 4, 2011 | 2 Comments

The 1977 Roland MC-8 MicroComposer Analog Sequencer

The Roland MC-8 MicroComposer Analog Sequencer, introduced in 1977 at a price of approximately $8,000 in the U.K. (around $4,750 in the U.S.), was the first digital microprocessor-driven, VC (Voltage Control) unit. This device incorporated a pre-MIDI means of synthesizer composition. MIDI, or Musical Instrument Digital Interface, is the standard electronic language ‘spoken’ between electronic instruments and the computerized devices which control them during performances. Developed in the early 1980s, MIDI technology would allow a keyboardist to start a drum synthesizer with one key or a computer to store a sequence of composed notes as a MIDI file, for instance. The keyboard, drum synthesizer and computer would all recognize the same coded instructions. Here’s a wonderful article on Canadian engineer Ralph Dyck, the man responsible for the sequencer technology that became the MC-8.

Roland System 100 Synthesizer 101 and Expander 102. (Photo: Florian Anwander, 2008)

This MicroComposer could adjust multiple sounds which emulated the effect of a synthesizer such as the Voltage Controlled Oscillator (VCO) and the Voltage Controlled Filter (VCF). The MC-8 was also designed to work with larger, modular synthesizers such as the Roland System 100 and 700.

At two pounds, the size of the MC-8’s instruction manual more closely resembled War and Peace than a computing guide. However, directions for performing such compositions such as a Brahms waltz, a mambo rhythm, ‘Yesterday’, ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ were provided, in addition to blank grid sheets for composing one’s own songs.

Original MC-8s included very limited memory – their 4 kb of RAM had the capacity to hold approximately 1,100 notes. Roland understood that this was small by any comparison, so Roland offered an upgrade that took the total capacity to a whopping sixteen kilobytes. On later models, 16kb was included as standard, which allowed enough memory for about 5,300 notes. On average, a four-minute song using the MP-8 could take in excess of ten minutes to save and another ten minutes to verify. But as slow as process this may now seem, it could be drawn out even longer if there were freeze-ups in the system preventing the necessary verification.

The album "The Man Machine" by Kraftwerk, which utilized the Roland MC-8

Bands that made expert use of the MC-8 from the early 1980s (together with their albums) included Kraftwerk with The Man Machine, and the Human League with Dare. But one of the foremost (and female) MC-8 pioneers was Suzanne Ciani. While an undergraduate at Massachusetts’ Wellesley College, Ciani, always interested in both performance and composition, became fascinated with the more technical aspects of music while visiting the nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology – where a professor demonstrated for her his early attempts to make a computer produce the sound of a violin.

MC-8 devotee Suzanne Ciani's album "Seven Waves"

Ciani continued her studies in composition at the University of California at Berkeley, where she received her Master’s Degree. Subsequent visits to nearby Stanford and Mills College introduced her to some of the pre-eminent musical programmers of the time, including John Chowning, Max Matthews and Don Buchla. In addition to composing her own music, she became an expert programmer of, among other devices, the MC-8. (See her describing synthesizing to David Letterman here). In a recent interview, she described how the MC-8 has influenced her music:

… with the MC-8, I could now program a composed melodic line of great detail and rhythmic variation.  I loved that with the MC-8 the strong dependable electronic pulse could be the foundation of the music – and thus very relaxing – but that I could also “romance” the expression to be very feminine as well.

Another enthusiast and expert of the MC-8 is London-born musician Chris Carter. Trained as a sound engineer, Carter is often credited as an inventor of the “industrial music” genre. He is also a regular contributor of technical articles and reviews for U.K. based Sound on Sound magazine. Together with his partner, Cosey Fanni Tutti and the late Peter Christopherson, he fronted the group Throbbing Gristle, and has worked with many notable musicians of the experimental variety such as John Cage.

The members of the pioneering industrial/experimental group Throbbing Gristle: Cosey Fanni Tutti, the late Peter Christopherson (1955-2010) and Chris Carter (Chris Carter photo)

For him, the MC-8 experience has been tempered by a number of the limitations I’ve already described. However, his affection for it remains undiminished. As he notes,

A lot of people … have sweated blood over and cursed this machine through the years — I know I have. But even with the ever-present lure of the mouse and monitor, I often find myself strangely drawn to the MC8. These days I tend to program it to play some fab sequences or bass lines … My MC8 has made an appearance on at least half of the 30 or so albums and singles I’ve released, the most recent being last year. Sure, it’s beginning to show its age now, but until it actually packs up I’ll continue to go back to it.

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Wired magazine’s “This Day in Tech” – an invaluable resource

Posted on January 3, 2011 | Leave a comment

I enjoy combing the web for obscure details about tech innovation, and have found Wired magazine’s “This Day in Tech” to be a wonderful resource for learning more about the history of technology – both its advances and setbacks. For example, on this particular day, January 3, 1957, the electric watch was developed by the Hamilton Watch Company of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

The blog has a menu list of ten of its most recent stories, as well as links to other suggested reading. Computer and digital history, space exploration, biology and architecture are but a few in an expansive range of topics explored on this page.

Wired, by seeking to help us understand innovation’s past, has shown itself to be very much forward-thinking. As philosopher and poet George Santayana once famously wrote, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This applies to the tech world as much as any other.  And through This Day in Tech, Wired has given us a touchstone to not only understand, but also to improve upon, or to avoid missteps with technology.

For a publication that is and has been at the forefront of seeking out and chronicling new and exciting developments in electronic gadgetry, This Day in Tech is a refreshing complement to Wired’s other useful features.

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Kodachrome: The film everyone misses but nobody wanted

Posted on January 3, 2011 | 1 Comment

After 75 iconic years, Kodak’s final roll of Kodachrome film was processed on December 30, 2010 at Dwayne’s Photo of Parsons, Kansas. The reason for discontinuance, as explained on Kodak’s website, was that sales “have declined dramatically in recent years as photographers turned to other films or digital capture.” At the time of its demise, Kodachrome represented just a fraction of one percent of Kodak’s total sales of still-picture films.

Afghan refugee Sharbat Gula, photographed on Kodachrome by Steve McCurry for National Geographic magazine in 1984

Kodachrome, which has produced some of the most memorable films and photographs in modern history, has had its legacy immortalized in motion pictures, photo and song. For instance, Kodachrome documented the airship Hindenburg’s explosion over a New Jersey airfield in 1937; mountaineer Edmund Hillary brought it to the top of Mount Everest in 1953; Abraham Zapruder used 8-mm Kodachrome in Dallas when he captured President Kennedy’s assassination, and in 1984, National Geographic magazine photographer Steve McCurry used it to arrest the gaze of Sharbat Gula, a Afghan refugee girl, for what is still the magazine’s most enduring and arguably most endearing cover image. Kodak gave McCurry the last roll of Kodachrome last year. And for many generations of Americans, Kodachrome provided visual legacies of their families through home movie projectors and slide carousels.

A capture from Abraham Zapruder's 8 millimeter Kodachrome film of President John F. Kennedy's assassination in November, 1963

Manufactured by Eastman Kodak from 1935 to 2009, Kodachrome was the first successfully mass-marketed color film which was unusual in that the richness of its colors was revealed only after the film was developed. Kodachrome required complex processing and was initially sold with processing included in the purchase price – in all countries with the exception of the United States, where a 1954 anti-trust ruling ended Kodak’s monopoly on Kodachrome’s development process.

On the website of the San Francisco Chronicle, SFGate.com, Pat Willard, a fine arts photographer from Redwood City, California, was melancholy, but appreciative of Kodachrome’s attributes: “The color balance is what I like,” he says, after thinking it through. “It’s warm and voluptuous.” Additionally, Kodachrome had a durability factor that was prized by archivists. Images created through the process are conservatively expected to last over one hundred years, and by some accounts, nearly two hundred. Unprocessed Kodachrome may survive long periods between exposure and processing. Remarkably, in one case, several rolls were exposed and then lost in a Canadian forest; upon discovery nineteen years later, they were processed and the slides were usable.

National Geographic photographer and Kodachrome devotee Steve McCurry

McCurry, the National Geographic photographer, who hand-delivered the final roll to the Kansas developer after he finished shooting, has posted some of the last 36 frames on his blog. The final photo, as he stated on CBS’s Sunday Morning program, was of a Civil War cemetery in Parsons, Kansas – a fitting metaphor for a film and a process which everyone misses, but nobody wanted. Now, all that remains of it is a song by Simon and Garfunkel, a state park in Utah bearing its name, and the memories of innumerable photographers who are grateful for its having existed.

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Jane Brox discusses “Brilliant” at the Boston Athenaeum, Dec. 16, 2010

Posted on December 17, 2010 | 1 Comment

Jane Brox came to the Boston Athenaeum last night to speak about and read from her recent book, Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light. A native of Dracut, in Massachusetts’ Merrimack Valley, she grew up on farms and eventually moved to Brunswick, Maine, where she now resides. Brilliant, incidentally, was just selected as one of Time magazine’s ten best nonfiction books of 2010.

She was moved to undertake Brilliant as the result of the confession of a neighbor who lived down the road from her family, also a farmer, who spoke to the awe he felt at obtaining artificial light for the first time during President Franklin Roosevelt’s Rural Electrification Act. The farmer’s very plain-spoken admission “They must have thought I was simple” was her single most forceful means of inspiration.

Painting of a herd of animals from the cave of Lascaux France, ca. 15,000 - 10,000 B.C. Courtesy, Melissa Markham

Brox proceeded to research the history of light, and this drew her back through time to Lascaux Cave in France. Examining the artwork of its prehistoric, Ice Age cave dwellers, Brox was struck both by the beauty of the caves and the wondrous utility of the primitive lighting that could make such art possible. At this time, the only means of artificial light involved burning animal or vegetable fat. Interestingly, there were few advances in this technique until the end of the 18th century, but it had several drawbacks: its horrible smell and dirty burn two primary ones. Additionally, its price was prohibitive for all but the privileged few.

During Medieval times, streets were completely dark after sunset. Curfews (from the French cuevrefeu, which means to cover one’s fire) or home confinement, were instituted for personal safety, with the only authorized citizens being night watchmen patrolling the streets. There was no “nightlife” as it now exists, until the 19th century.

Diagram of an early arc lighting system. Courtesy, University of South Florida.

The advent of electric lighting in the late 19th century altered our lifestyles forever. However, in its early days, it was often unwieldy and adventuresome. Arc lighting, where an electric arc in a lamp consists of gas ionized by high voltage and becomes electrically conductive, as well as incandescent lighting, employing a bulb containing a glowing filament, were two methods succeeding gas and oil lamps. Gas lights were first widely used in commercial settings, as well as for street lamps, but often proved quite dangerous. Even kerosene could be adulterated to make it more volatile and combustible. It also was extraordinarily dirty when burning. The introduction of electricity immediately minimized dangers of fire constantly present with gas and oil lamps.

Thomas Edison's carbonized cotton filament incandescent bulb. Courtesy, Franklin Institute

England was ahead of the U.S. in the use of gas lights when the Thomas Alva Edison invented his incandescent bulb. England used coal-fueled gas lighting stored in cylindrical containers called gasometers. Again, these devices emitted terrible odors, but provided reliable lighting to a fairly large population. Edison, for his part, envisioned his lights to be similarly used in an urban system with much of the infrastructure employed by gas lighting – including meters, generators, etc. In 1879, Edison and his trusted assistant, Charles Batchelor, tested his cotton-filament incandescent bulb. It was a successful test in which the bulb burned for fifteen consecutive hours; but its cotton filament was eventually supplanted by bamboo.

In the 1930s, President Franklin Roosevelt advanced his Rural Electrification program as a means of bringing electric lighting to the vast rural American public. Prior to this, electric lighting was largely in the possession of commercial interests and the wealthy. It brought immediate and dramatic changes to the way Americans ordered their lives. People eagerly awaited the “zero hour” when they were officially connected to a main power grid. Such was the awe-inspiring wonder of this new phenomenon, Brox stated, that there were known instances of people not wanting to let go of the metal chain connected to the attached fixture for fear of the light extinguishing. Also, she noted that it was not unusual for families to drive away from their homes to watch the lights burning from inside the windows. It was the true democratization of a technology that had always been just beyond the reach of most Americans.

A typical municipal power grid

By 1950, most Americans were officially connected to one power grid or another. However, just as is the case today, many still did not connect and remained “off the grid” by choice. A decade later, we were facing the new and highly-inconvenient phenomenon of blackouts due to overtaxing of the grid, but have managed to enjoy largely safe and reliable lighting for the more than a century since electric lighting was first invented.

Jane Brox, courtesy, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

In closing her talk, Brox took a variety of questions and spoke about the near extinction of sperm and right whales during the 19th century due to over-harvesting for use of their oil in lamps. She also stated that electric lights, as driven by our industrialized society, caused our sleeping patters to change – and that a typical eight-hour sleep was not always typical. In non-industrialized settings, divided or segmented sleep was the norm as opposed to uninterrupted nighttime sleep. As a result, electric light has infiltrated our biological clock. But overall, Brox says she hesitated from adding a chapter to the book on the future of lighting, because technological advances are now occurring so quickly, it’s difficult to plot a presumed direction with any great degree of certainty.

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Martin Cooper, Father of the Cellular Phone

Posted on December 8, 2010 | 1 Comment

Martin Cooper - from RetroBrick

Martin Cooper, who turns 82 on December 26th, is an electrical engineer – having gained his Master’s degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1957. He began work with Motorola in 1954, and it was during his tenure there, in 1973, that he conceived the first cellular phone. He then spent the next decade working to bring it to market.

Cooper’s inspiration for undertaking the project was the Star Trek television series, in which a small, hand-held ”communicator” device was used very much in the manner of a portable phone. Once Cooper had successfully tested his phone prototype, there was an instant shift in thinking among telecommunications gurus, who had for years said that telephoning would depend on the phone’s location, rather than the caller.  At the time, so-called “land lines” and telephone booths were the only means of placing calls, so Cooper recalled with some amusement, in an interview he gave to EngineeringCrossing,  the public’s initial reaction to his walking down the street with a portable telephone:

As I walked down the street while talking on the phone, sophisticated New Yorkers gaped at the sight of someone actually moving around while making a phone call. Remember that in 1973 there weren’t cordless telephones, let alone cellular phones. I made numerous calls, including one where I crossed the street while talking to a New York radio reporter – probably one of the more dangerous things I have ever done in my life.

Interestingly, the first person he called was Joel Engel, his chief rival at AT&T’s Bell Labs, to tell him he was calling on a portable phone.

1983 Motorola DynaTAC portable phone

The original phone weighed a gargantuan 30 ounces, and was referred to as the “Brick.” In 1983, Motorola introduced the DynaTAC phone, which was about half as heavy, with a price tag of more than $3,500. Cellular phone users were few and far between up until about 1990, when the million-subscriber mark was hit.

Cooper says that the project to put a phone together took a little over three months, and he says he wasn’t alone. A crew of industrial designers and engineers built upon Cooper’s concept. In fact, Cooper says there was a contest among five different designers, after which he picked the “simplest” one. He modestly asserts his only contribution was to think of the original idea and to “pull all of Motorola’s wonderful resources to make all of this happen.”

Cooper and his colleagues’ drive to take on AT&T was a prime motivator

A.T.&T./Bell Labs' Joel S. Engel

during the project. He said that at the time, their prime competitor had invented a concept called “cellular communications,” but that they saw a future for this technology only in cars. Motorola, he asserts, vigorously disputed that notion.

Cooper left Motorola during 1983 to create a new company that built software and billing systems for the cellular industry. After selling that firm in 1986, he set upon creating his current venture, ArrayComm (begun in 1992), which is focusing on such concepts as “smart antennas” and faster broadband technology that will deliver the internet to portable users faster and more cheaply. This he began with his wife, Arlene Harris (also a high-tech entrepreneur), and engineers from Stanford University. Starting in 2003, ArrayComm developed a broadband wireless system called iBurst, which has been used successfully in various parts of Australia. And in terms of sheer creative output, ArrayComm’s efforts have been prodigious – with over 420 patents and applications for patents in its name. Cooper insists the increased speed and efficiency of modern computers have enabled their antennas to deliver wireless access at a dramatically reduced cost. This has permitted them to serve millions of wireless subscribers in the Far East.

Martin Cooper and his wife, engineer Arlene Harris

With nearly four decades of success in the telecommunications industry, Cooper’s guiding philosophy is to look to its bright future:

It’s very exciting to be a part of a movement toward making broadband available to people with the same freedom to be anywhere that they have for voice communications today. People rely heavily on the Internet for their work, entertainment, and communication, but they need to be unleashed.

But for all his present work in developing this technology, arguably Cooper’s greatest single achievement remains the development of the original portable phone, which, he asserts, did not occur by accident, but was instead the product of a very methodical and well-planned approach designed to fulfill a basic and fundamental human need – to maintain telephone contact while mobile.

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Programmers as the “Cosa Nostra” of the Computer Industry

Posted on November 24, 2010 | Leave a comment

The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise, by Nathan Ensmenger. Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press. $30

The social, technical and business dynamics of computing are as wide and varied as the professionals who participate in them. Trying to reconcile the relationship among these often competing cultures is what Nathan Ensmenger accomplishes with aplomb in the course of his 320 page study – which follows the history of computing in America in the post-World War II period until the early 1970s.

Ensmenger looks at the lot of computer programmers – who in early times were often women – and how managers sought to relegate them to subordinate levels on a company’s organizational scale. Managers, in Ensmenger’s words, “…came to fear and dislike computer programmers and other software specialists … The unprecedented degree of autonomy that corporate executives granted to computer technicians seemed a deliberate affront to the local authority of departmental managers.” Computer technicians were viewed by middle-managers as non-conformist threats to the order of a corporate structure; but because of computer companies’ reliance on them, were largely tolerated, if nothing more. Comparatively speaking, Scott Adams’ popular comic strip, “Dilbert” had nothing on the reality.

"Dilbert" courtesy, Scott Adams

One excerpt, from the periodical Personnel Journal, advised companies about programming personnel as follows:

“Look for those who like intellectual challenge rather than interpersonal relations or managerial decision-making … Do not consider the impulsive, the glad-hander or the ‘operator.’”

Ensmenger then looks at some of the generalizations that persisted in the minds of management and management consultants of this early period - such as the one personality characteristic of programmers that appeared to be universally recognized: a “disinterest in people.” This, along with other appraisals of programmers’ “innate and inarticulable” skill were the prevailing criteria for hiring practices within the industry.  Personnel were selected “on the basis of their aptitude tests and personality profiles that emphasized mathematical ability and logical thinking over business knowledge or managerial savvy.” And as the management consultant Richard Brandon described it, the average programmer was often “egocentric, slightly neurotic, and he borders upon a limited schizophrenia.” And finally, in heaping stereotype upon stereotype, yet another consultant declared that programmers could be singled out in any corporation by their “higher incidence of beards, sandals and other symptoms of rugged individualism or nonconformity.”

But probably the most colorful of descriptions came from programmer/management consultant Herbert Grosch, who declared  programmers the “Cosa Nostra” of the computer industry, who

“…are at once the most unmanageable and the most poorly managed specialism in our society. Actors and artists pale by comparison. Only pure mathematicians are as cantankerous, and it’s a calamity that so many of them get recruited by simplistic personnel men.”

Nobel Prize-winner Herbert Simon

Through such stark language, the “battle line” between managers and programmers was clearly drawn in the sand. With two distinctive business cultures at odds, there was one over-arching reality: computer programmers, software specialists and technicians were increasingly important as the computer industry grew. By 1960, there were already 60,000 systems analysts and as many as 120,000 programmers in the industry. So the reality was that they had to live with each other. But as Ensmenger shows, it wasn’t at all easy. Nobel Prize-winner Herbert Simon, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, believed that machines would eventually supplant the programmer in the workplace. His 1960 book, The New Science of Management, predicted that in 25 years, organizations will “have the technical capability of substituting machines for any and all human functions in organizations.” Interestingly, as scientists in New Zealand have demonstrated, an operational jet pack has proven a much more viable concept.

McKinsey and Company delivered what Ensmenger calls “Perhaps the most devastating critique of corporate computing” in a 1968 report which rocked the industry. It noted that despite “sophisticated hardware,” “larger and increasingly costly computer staffs,” and “complex and ingenious applications,” none of the major computer companies were anywhere near realizing their anticipated investment. The earlier gap in programming support, by the time of McKinsey, had reached a “software crisis.”

As demonstrated by the copious notes included at the end of the book, there were rafts of studies by, among others, Harvard Business School, to try and analyze and improve the divisions between the software and management factions. In attempts to “professionalize” the programming field, numerous societies and other organizations were formed, such as the Association for Computer Machinery (ACM), and the American Federation of Information Processing Societies (AFIPS).

Ensmenger culminates his study with a discussion of the 1968 NATO Conference on Software Engineering held in Rome, which he notes represented a “major turning point in the history of the industry and profession” in trying to resolve the crisis of not being able to professionalize within the corporate structure – to improve conditions for employees and to ultimately make a “switch from home-made software to manufactured software, from tinkering to engineering.” However, he ends this particular chapter by saying that the conference was ultimately a failure because the groups within the conference just couldn’t get along – with descriptives such as “sterile,” “never clicked,” and “disillusionment” featured in various post-mortems.

Grace Hopper

Still another important dynamic Ensmenger confronts is gender. According to a 1967 Cosmopolitan article, “The Computer Girls,” there were already 20,000 women working as computer programmers in the United States. Formidable programmers, such as Adm. Grace Hopper, Betty Snyder Holbertson, Jean Sammer, etc., were originally employed in post-war computing as “hackers,” who would “de-bug” computers so that they ran more efficiently and reliably. For example, Howard Aiken, who ran Harvard’s computer program during World War II for the U.S. military, came to rely heavily on Hopper, and treated her as an intellectual equal. However, in later times, with corporate appropriation of computing, women were often seen as “proxies for low-cost or low-skill labor.” For instance, a 1963 Datamation article asserted:

“Women are less aggressive and more content in one position … Women consider fringe benefits of more importance than their male peers and are more prone to stay on the job if they are content, regardless of lack of advancement. They also maintain their original geographic roots and are less willing to travel or changed job locations, particularly if they are married or engaged.”

By the late 1960s, International Business Machines (IBM) produced an ad campaign, which nowadays would be considered very politically incorrect, featuring an attractive, young, blond, bookish, and bespectacled programmer, Susie Meyer. IBM was pushing the message that women like Susie Meyer represented the type of programmer who would save corporations considerable money in software production. And … they were thought to be non-threatening within the company’s [male] management structure.

Ensmenger’s conclusion, upon seeing the relative disappearance of women from programming in the late 1960s, determined that it was largely “professionalization” that forced them out. He cites Cornell Professor Margaret Rossiter, who suggested that “professionalization nearly always requires the exclusion of women.”

Nathan Ensmenger

Though some chapters that dwell on the minutiae of programming languages might escape the average reader, Ensmenger has crafted an orderly and well-organized argument that the dynamics of managing computer firms have often been as complex as the subject matter itself. Social interaction, management structures and gender have played pivotal roles in the development of computer technology, which defy the traditional notion that mathematics and computers are somehow above such dynamics. In this important way, The Computer Boys Take Over is learned, well-documented with citations, and often humorous – with numerous period cartoons and company advertisements that nicely support the text. Such a study of computing’s early and arguably most important years, is long overdue.

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They Drove the High Tech Revolution in Silicon Valley

Posted on September 29, 2010 | Leave a comment

Makers of the Microchip: A Documentary History of Fairchild Semiconductor, by Christophe Lécuyer and David C. Brock. Foreword by Jay Last. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2010.

This extraordinary portrait of the firm that was at the forefront of the Silicon Valley startup phenomenon begins in 1957, with eight former employees of the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. Jay Last, co-founder of the firm, in his Introduction, maps out in very readable fashion the business model the firm methodically employed and religiously followed to become the pre-eminent manufacturer of silicon transistors for use in digital computers. This history centers on the period between the company’s formative years, from 1957 until the early 1960s.

Fairchild Semiconductor's founders, clockwise from far left: Jean Hoerni, Julius Blank, Victor H. Grinich, Eugene Kleiner, Gordon E. Moore, C. Sheldon Roberts, Jay T. Last, Robert N. Noyce.

As Last notes, the firm, named for its original backer, Fairchild Camera and Instrument, was just getting going as the Soviet Union had successfully launched its Sputnik space project. The U.S. military quickly concluded they needed to initiate faster, digitally-based computers to help with defense strategies, and so Fairchild, who had chosen to specialize in semiconductivity, was in a unique position to aid in this initiative.

The company was funded by the New York investment house of Hayden and Stone – one of the first such venture firm financings – and it set up shop just outside of San Francisco. From the start, Fairchild employed a context called “User Logic” to define its business mission and to both identify and pursue goals. Within this context, there were four factors that defined the corporation: reliability of components; miniaturization; increased speed, and lastly, the unrelenting push for digital systems and digital computers in military applications. The U.S. military was keenly interested in developing smaller and faster components as they believed they would be more reliable. Fairchild concurred and pursued this mission aggressively, and ultimately, very profitably.

Stock certificate of Fairchild Camera and Instrument, Fairchild Semiconductor's parent corporation.

As Last himself admits, “Responding to these logics, Fairchild Semiconductor’s founders created technological innovations and made business decisions that brought Fairchild from a start-up to a leadership position in the semiconductor manufacturing industry by 1961.” Within this four-year period, Fairchild had developed the technology for diffused silicon devices, the planar process, and the planar integrated circuit – crucial innovations that set the path the semiconductor field has well-worn to this day.

Jean Hoerni, a founder and one of the company’s most accomplished transistor designers, specialized in the PNP transistor, consisting of a silicon and Boron derivative, which maximized both the efficiency and efficacy of the devices. He invented the “planar process” and “gold doping” – the former being an allusion to the transistor’s shape, which resembled a two-tiered mesa, and the latter the process of adding a gold-plating to the transistor, thereby reducing resistance and increasing transmission speed.

Though the book is well-referenced and annotated, perhaps its most striking feature is the reproduction of numerous company documents never before published. There are graph-paper renderings of circuit designs, preliminary and official patent filings, and photographs – taken largely from Jay Last’s personal archive. The authors also thoughtfully include an Appendix that describes the technological concepts and components outlined in the body of the text in lay-speak. Overall, the book is a magnificent contribution to the history of Silicon Valley, featuring a company that has been under-chronicled to this point. Without question, it should reside prominently on every high tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist’s bookshelf.

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After 18 Years, Autodesk Reintroduces AutoCAD for the Mac

Posted on August 31, 2010 | Leave a comment

On August 31, 2010, Autodesk announced AutoCAD for the Mac.  This version of AutoCAD, runs natively on Mac OS X. The company also announced AutoCAD WS mobile application, a new app for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch that will allow users to edit and share their AutoCAD designs in the field.

The New York Times quoted Amar Hanspal, senior vice president, Autodesk Platform Solutions and Emerging Business as saying “Autodesk could no longer ignore Mac’s comeback.”   The New York Times article also said that ”The Mac was once a popular platform for AutoCAD. But Apple’s share of the personal computer market dwindled in the early 1990s, so Autodesk made its last version of AutoCAD for the Mac in 1992, and stopped supporting it in 1994. The company continued to make other products for the Mac, including software used in the entertainment industry.”

The Mac’s comeback is hard to ignore.  In May 2010, Apple passed Microsoft in market cap.  Earlier this month, Fortune reported that over the last five years, “Apple has switched places with Dell as the laptop of choice.”  The New York Times article says “The Mac accounted for nearly 10 percent of all PCs sold around the world in the first quarter, according to Gartner, or more than double its share just a few years ago. In the most recent quarter, Apple sold nearly 3.5 million Mac computers, a 33 percent increase from the same quarter a year earlier. That rate of growth far exceeded the overall PC market.”

AutoCAD for Mac Built for Mac OS X

According to the Autodesk press release, AutoCAD for Mac makes available many of the powerful AutoCAD features and functionality. The software takes full advantage of Mac OS X, and it offers easy collaboration with suppliers, customers, clients and partners regardless of platform. Files created in previous versions of AutoCAD will open  in AutoCAD for Mac.

AutoCAD Extended to iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch

Autodesk also announced the AutoCAD WS mobile application that will extend AutoCAD to Apple’s iOS. The AutoCAD WS app lets AutoCAD users edit and share AutoCAD files on iPad, iPhone and iPod touch.

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Posted in Apple, High Tech History

History of PC Magazine

Posted on August 23, 2010 | Leave a comment

With every industry, comes its trade publications.  And with the IBM personal computer industry came many publications like PC Magazine.  ”PC” was originally published in January, 1982.   It was created by David Bunnell and financed by Tony Gold.

Originally, a monthly magazine, “PC Mag” moved to biweekly publication in 1983 when one monthly issue grew to over  800 pages! In January, 1986, the magazine had a major redesign and the word “magazine” was added to the logo.

Due to popularity, the magazine outgrew its financing and was sold to Ziff-Davis around 1982.  At this time, the staff left to form PC World magazine.  The online edition of the magazine started in 1994,  and as of 2009, it is only available online.  That decision was made due to declining print ad sales.

The magazine provides reviews and previews of the latest hardware and software.  Regular departments include:

  • First Looks (a collection of reviews of newly released products)
  • Pipeline (a collection of short articles and snippets on computer-industry developments)
  • Solutions (which includes various how-to articles)
  • User-to-User (a section in which the magazine’s experts answer user-submitted questions)
  • After Hours (a section about various computer entertainment products)

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Posted in High Tech History, IBM

Firsthand Perspectives from a Vanishing Age

Posted on June 21, 2010 | Leave a comment

One of the most important gifts one generation can leave to another is its history. The firsthand recollections of those who have lived full and productive lives have much to teach those who follow them, and in Stuart Lutz’ The Last Leaf: Voices of History’s Last-Known Survivors, there is a wealth of such recollections.

Lutz, whose own background is as a dealer of rare manuscripts and documents, spent several years conducting interviews with nearly forty individuals whose associations offer unique insight into historically important events. Among the individuals highlighted are the last Union and Confederate Civil War widows; the last survivor of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire; the last Medal of Honor recipient for heroism at Pearl Harbor, and the last surviving passenger of the sunken ship Lusitania. Uniformly, these are accounts steeped in humility, in which the subjects tend not to focus on themselves, but rather on the events that they helped shape, and vice-versa.

Among these biographies are three of interest to enthusiasts of high-tech history and innovation, included in “Part 3: Witnesses to Technological Innovation.” Arthur Burks, whom Lutz calls the “Last Major Designer of the ENIAC, the First Electronic General-Purpose Computer,” was a colleague of John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, the two major figures behind the development and construction of the ENIAC computer. The ENIAC was designed in response to the U.S. military desiring a computer to calculate artillery trajectories.

Burks, who was born in 1915 in Duluth, Minnesota, was the son of a high school math teacher. He received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan in 1941, and later was encouraged by a friend to take a government-supported course for math and physics students at the University of Pennsylvania – where he met Eckert and Mauchly. In 1943, Burks began working for the Eckert and Mauchly lab, which had a government contract to build the ENIAC. Burks’ job was to diagram circuits to calculate artillery trajectories, as well as being the only one authorized to check the ENIAC’s circuits. The computer contained eighteen thousand vacuum tubes, and so it was a huge job. But Burks never doubted that they would be successful.

In February of 1946, Burks introduced the ENIAC to the public. Shortly thereafter, the mathematician John von Neumann offered him a job at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. Burks came back to Michigan later that year and became a professor of both philosophy and computer science and remained there until his passing in 2008.

Pem Farnsworth was the widow of Philo Farnsworth – the man widely credited with innovating the modern television. Philo Taylor Farnsworth was born in a log cabin near Beaver, Utah, August 19, 1906. He was mechanically gifted from an early age, and apparently came up with a variation of the television idea when he was only fourteen.

In addition to discussing the technology of his invention, Mrs. Farnsworth talked in detail about the competition and animosity between her late husband and the head of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), David Sarnoff. Dr. Vladimir Zworkin, a Westinghouse engineer working at the same time as Farnsworth, applied for a patent for the television in 1923 (he received it in 1938).  About 1930, Sarnoff gave Zworkin his own laboratory, where Zworkin continued to improve the technology. By that time, it was becoming understood that there was great money to be made in television, and this led to a patent infringement lawsuit Farnsworth filed against Zworkin in 1934. Farnsworth prevailed, and in 1936, an appeals court upheld the decision.

In 1939, an “unhappy” Sarnoff signed a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Farnsworth, and later that year, the public was introduced to the technology at the World’s Fair in New York. Pem Farnsworth states that after that time, Sarnoff went to great lengths to erase her husband from the history books. Mrs. Farnsworth, who never received any royalties for her husband’s invention, stated that her husband feared a protracted war with RCA, and that by the time it was resolved, the patent rights, good for seventeen years, would have expired.

Pem Farnsworth, who passed in 2006, had been made a member of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and in 2002 was invited to the Emmy Awards where she met Thomas Sarnoff, the son of David. Persuaded by others, she decided to go so it did not appear she was holding any grudges.

She mentioned that her late husband’s favorite television moment was watching the moon landing. He had said that seeing Neil Armstrong walk on the moon “made it all worthwhile.” ln fact, according to Mrs. Farnsworth, her husband had always wanted to go into space, and never gave up that dream until the last six months of his life.

In 1999, Time magazine did a retrospective on the century’s greatest scientists and thinkers, and alongside profiles of Einstein, Salk, the Wright brothers and Sigmund Freud, they included Farnsworth’s forgotten tale, nothing that “we ought not to let the century expire without attempting to make amends.”

Within that same 1999 issue of Time, Thomas Alva Edison resided at the very top of the list of those prominent scientists and thinkers. Robert Halgrim, who met Edison as a boy, is mentioned by Lutz as the last man alive to work with him.

Edison was born in Ohio in 1847 and later moved to Michigan. At about the age of fifteen, the precocious student became the manager of a telegraph office, which inspired him to create his first invention, a transmitter and receiver for an automatic telegraph. By twenty-one, he had invented his first commercially successful invention, a stock ticker. The forty-thousand dollars he received for the sale of this invention paved the way for his relocation to Menlo Park, New Jersey, where he created a lab.

Robert Halgrim, born in Humboldt, Iowa in September of 1905, met Edison in Fort Myers, Florida around 1920, at the movie theatre Halgrim’s father owned there. Edison would bring his family in for private showings, and the young Halgrim would often show the films. During the 1924 Christmas season, Edison brought his grandchildren to Fort Myers. They needed someone to be a teacher and nanny for them, and so Edison asked the head of the local Boy Scout troop for a recommendation. Halgrim was recommended, wound up traveling back-and-forth between Fort Myers and Menlo Park, and eventually came to be regarded as a member of the Edison family. Edison even paid for Halgrim to attend Cornell University.

After three years of college, Halgrim became Edison’s personal assistant, and remained so until Edison’s death. Halgrim remembered Edison as someone who was not overly impressed by money – that he typically used money he made to help underwrite new inventions and had a genuine desire to improve things for mankind. Edison was held in great esteem by other prominent businessmen and inventors of the era – including the rubber manufacturer Harvey Firestone (for whom Edison established rubber factories) and auto maker Henry Ford. In fact, according to Halgrim, Ford named three of his cars after Edison: the Model  T for “Thomas,” the Model A for “Alva,” and the Edsel for “Edison.”

After Edison passed, his widow asked Halgrim to be curator of their winter home, which was being converted into a museum. Halgrim, and later his son, both served in that capacity. And when Henry Ford sold his home to the city of Fort Myers, the combination of their homes created what was to become one of the biggest attractions in the entire region.

In summing up his thoughts about “the greatest inventor,” Halgrim recalls that Edison created 1,087 different inventions, and that there wasn’t a thing he wasn’t interested in. Virtually everything about our daily lives is dependent on his inventions – the electric foremost among those – though Halgrim adds sadly that it was a shame “he kept all of his knowledge to himself, so no one could carry on his thoughts and produce any of the things he made. When he died, it all went with him.”

Other biographies in this section explore the invention and development of radio technology, as well as one of the last physicists present at the “first controlled nuclear reaction.” Taken together, these anecdotes provide a wealth of what one could call “last firsts”; that is, the last (or among the last) living persons present at the creation or the first appearance of a technological touchstone. The Last Leaf is an important book for those who want to understand what drives inventors – from those who lived with them.

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