POPULARITY
Knowledge Project: Read the notes at at podcastnotes.org. Don't forget to subscribe for free to our newsletter, the top 10 ideas of the week, every Monday --------- Most people protect their identity. Andy Grove would rewrite his, again and again. He started as a refugee, became a chemist, turned himself into an engineer, then a manager, and finally the CEO who built Intel into a global powerhouse. He didn't cling to credentials or titles. When a challenge came up, he didn't delegate, he learned. This episode explores the radical adaptability that made Grove different. While his peers obsessed over innovation, he focused on something far more enduring: the systems, structures, and people needed to scale that innovation. Grove understood that as complexity rises, technical brilliance fades and coordination becomes king. You'll learn how he redefined leadership, why he saw management as a creative act, and what most founders still get wrong about building great companies. If you're serious about getting better—at work, at thinking, at leading—this is the episode you'll be glad you didn't miss. This episode is for informational purposes only and most of the research came from The Life and Times of an American by Richard S. Tedlow, Only the Paranoid Survive by Andy Grove, and Tom Wolfe's profile of Robert Noyce available here. Check out highlights from these books in our repository, and find key lessons from Grove here — https://fs.blog/knowledge-project-podcast/outliers-andy-grove/ (05:02 ) PART 1: Hungarian Beginnings(06:48) German Occupation(09:27) Soviet Liberation(11:01) End of the War(12:35) Leaving Hungary (14:10) PART 2: In America(16:50) Origin of Silicon Valley(20:04) Fairchild (22:54) PART 3: Building Intel(25:15) Becoming a Manager(29:39) Intel's Make-or-Break Moment(31:35) Quality Control Obsession(34:41) Orchestrating Brilliance(37:49) The Microprocessor Revolution and Intel's Growth(40:32) Intel's Growth and the Microma Lesson(30:51) The Grove Influence(47:00) The Birth of Intel Culture(49:42) The Fruits of Transformation(50:43) The Test Ahead (53:07) PART 4: Inflection Points(55:23) The Valley of Death(58:26) The IBM Lesson(01:01:18) CASSANDRA's: The Value of Middle Management(01:04:09) Executing a Painful Pivot (01:08:25) Reflections, afterthoughts, and lessons Thanks to our sponsors for supporting this episode: MOMENTOUS: Head to livemomentous.com and use code KNOWLEDGEPROJECT for 35% off your first subscription. NOTION MAIL: Get Notion Mail for free right now at notion.com/knowledgeproject Upgrade — If you want to hear my thoughts and reflections at the end of all episodes, join our membership: fs.blog/membership and get your own private feed. Newsletter — The Brain Food newsletter delivers actionable insights and thoughtful ideas every Sunday. It takes 5 minutes to read, and it's completely free. Learn more and sign up at fs.blog/newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Knowledge Project Key Takeaways Check out the episode pageRead the full notes @ podcastnotes.orgMost people protect their identity. Andy Grove would rewrite his, again and again. He started as a refugee, became a chemist, turned himself into an engineer, then a manager, and finally the CEO who built Intel into a global powerhouse. He didn't cling to credentials or titles. When a challenge came up, he didn't delegate, he learned. This episode explores the radical adaptability that made Grove different. While his peers obsessed over innovation, he focused on something far more enduring: the systems, structures, and people needed to scale that innovation. Grove understood that as complexity rises, technical brilliance fades and coordination becomes king. You'll learn how he redefined leadership, why he saw management as a creative act, and what most founders still get wrong about building great companies. If you're serious about getting better—at work, at thinking, at leading—this is the episode you'll be glad you didn't miss. This episode is for informational purposes only and most of the research came from The Life and Times of an American by Richard S. Tedlow, Only the Paranoid Survive by Andy Grove, and Tom Wolfe's profile of Robert Noyce available here. Check out highlights from these books in our repository, and find key lessons from Grove here — https://fs.blog/knowledge-project-podcast/outliers-andy-grove/ (05:02 ) PART 1: Hungarian Beginnings(06:48) German Occupation(09:27) Soviet Liberation(11:01) End of the War(12:35) Leaving Hungary (14:10) PART 2: In America(16:50) Origin of Silicon Valley(20:04) Fairchild (22:54) PART 3: Building Intel(25:15) Becoming a Manager(29:39) Intel's Make-or-Break Moment(31:35) Quality Control Obsession(34:41) Orchestrating Brilliance(37:49) The Microprocessor Revolution and Intel's Growth(40:32) Intel's Growth and the Microma Lesson(30:51) The Grove Influence(47:00) The Birth of Intel Culture(49:42) The Fruits of Transformation(50:43) The Test Ahead (53:07) PART 4: Inflection Points(55:23) The Valley of Death(58:26) The IBM Lesson(01:01:18) CASSANDRA's: The Value of Middle Management(01:04:09) Executing a Painful Pivot (01:08:25) Reflections, afterthoughts, and lessons Thanks to our sponsors for supporting this episode: MOMENTOUS: Head to livemomentous.com and use code KNOWLEDGEPROJECT for 35% off your first subscription. NOTION MAIL: Get Notion Mail for free right now at notion.com/knowledgeproject Upgrade — If you want to hear my thoughts and reflections at the end of all episodes, join our membership: fs.blog/membership and get your own private feed. Newsletter — The Brain Food newsletter delivers actionable insights and thoughtful ideas every Sunday. It takes 5 minutes to read, and it's completely free. Learn more and sign up at fs.blog/newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Knowledge Project Key Takeaways Check out the episode pageRead the full notes @ podcastnotes.orgMost people protect their identity. Andy Grove would rewrite his, again and again. He started as a refugee, became a chemist, turned himself into an engineer, then a manager, and finally the CEO who built Intel into a global powerhouse. He didn't cling to credentials or titles. When a challenge came up, he didn't delegate, he learned. This episode explores the radical adaptability that made Grove different. While his peers obsessed over innovation, he focused on something far more enduring: the systems, structures, and people needed to scale that innovation. Grove understood that as complexity rises, technical brilliance fades and coordination becomes king. You'll learn how he redefined leadership, why he saw management as a creative act, and what most founders still get wrong about building great companies. If you're serious about getting better—at work, at thinking, at leading—this is the episode you'll be glad you didn't miss. This episode is for informational purposes only and most of the research came from The Life and Times of an American by Richard S. Tedlow, Only the Paranoid Survive by Andy Grove, and Tom Wolfe's profile of Robert Noyce available here. Check out highlights from these books in our repository, and find key lessons from Grove here — https://fs.blog/knowledge-project-podcast/outliers-andy-grove/ (05:02 ) PART 1: Hungarian Beginnings(06:48) German Occupation(09:27) Soviet Liberation(11:01) End of the War(12:35) Leaving Hungary (14:10) PART 2: In America(16:50) Origin of Silicon Valley(20:04) Fairchild (22:54) PART 3: Building Intel(25:15) Becoming a Manager(29:39) Intel's Make-or-Break Moment(31:35) Quality Control Obsession(34:41) Orchestrating Brilliance(37:49) The Microprocessor Revolution and Intel's Growth(40:32) Intel's Growth and the Microma Lesson(30:51) The Grove Influence(47:00) The Birth of Intel Culture(49:42) The Fruits of Transformation(50:43) The Test Ahead (53:07) PART 4: Inflection Points(55:23) The Valley of Death(58:26) The IBM Lesson(01:01:18) CASSANDRA's: The Value of Middle Management(01:04:09) Executing a Painful Pivot (01:08:25) Reflections, afterthoughts, and lessons Thanks to our sponsors for supporting this episode: MOMENTOUS: Head to livemomentous.com and use code KNOWLEDGEPROJECT for 35% off your first subscription. NOTION MAIL: Get Notion Mail for free right now at notion.com/knowledgeproject Upgrade — If you want to hear my thoughts and reflections at the end of all episodes, join our membership: fs.blog/membership and get your own private feed. Newsletter — The Brain Food newsletter delivers actionable insights and thoughtful ideas every Sunday. It takes 5 minutes to read, and it's completely free. Learn more and sign up at fs.blog/newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Most people protect their identity. Andy Grove would rewrite his, again and again. He started as a refugee, became a chemist, turned himself into an engineer, then a manager, and finally the CEO who built Intel into a global powerhouse. He didn't cling to credentials or titles. When a challenge came up, he didn't delegate, he learned. This episode explores the radical adaptability that made Grove different. While his peers obsessed over innovation, he focused on something far more enduring: the systems, structures, and people needed to scale that innovation. Grove understood that as complexity rises, technical brilliance fades and coordination becomes king. You'll learn how he redefined leadership, why he saw management as a creative act, and what most founders still get wrong about building great companies. If you're serious about getting better—at work, at thinking, at leading—this is the episode you'll be glad you didn't miss. This episode is for informational purposes only and most of the research came from The Life and Times of an American by Richard S. Tedlow, Only the Paranoid Survive by Andy Grove, and Tom Wolfe's profile of Robert Noyce available here. Check out highlights from these books in our repository, and find key lessons from Grove here — https://fs.blog/knowledge-project-podcast/outliers-andy-grove/ (05:02 ) PART 1: Hungarian Beginnings(06:48) German Occupation(09:27) Soviet Liberation(11:01) End of the War(12:35) Leaving Hungary (14:10) PART 2: In America(16:50) Origin of Silicon Valley(20:04) Fairchild (22:54) PART 3: Building Intel(25:15) Becoming a Manager(29:39) Intel's Make-or-Break Moment(31:35) Quality Control Obsession(34:41) Orchestrating Brilliance(37:49) The Microprocessor Revolution and Intel's Growth(40:32) Intel's Growth and the Microma Lesson(30:51) The Grove Influence(47:00) The Birth of Intel Culture(49:42) The Fruits of Transformation(50:43) The Test Ahead (53:07) PART 4: Inflection Points(55:23) The Valley of Death(58:26) The IBM Lesson(01:01:18) CASSANDRA's: The Value of Middle Management(01:04:09) Executing a Painful Pivot (01:08:25) Reflections, afterthoughts, and lessons Thanks to our sponsors for supporting this episode: MOMENTOUS: Head to livemomentous.com and use code KNOWLEDGEPROJECT for 35% off your first subscription. NOTION MAIL: Get Notion Mail for free right now at notion.com/knowledgeproject Upgrade — If you want to hear my thoughts and reflections at the end of all episodes, join our membership: fs.blog/membership and get your own private feed. Newsletter — The Brain Food newsletter delivers actionable insights and thoughtful ideas every Sunday. It takes 5 minutes to read, and it's completely free. Learn more and sign up at fs.blog/newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30,准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题:Lip-Bu Tan, the man trying to save Intel The struggling American chip giant's new boss is no stranger to comebacks 正文:INTEL, AMERICA'S semiconductor giant, has had some notable bosses. Robert Noyce, its first, invented the silicon chip that gave Silicon Valley its name. Gordon Moore, who came next, etched his place in tech lore with a prediction—Moore's Law—that processing power would double every two years at the same cost. Andy Grove, the third boss, turned Intel into a semiconductor juggernaut, driven by the mantra that “only the paranoid survive.” The latest to join this lineage is Lip-Bu Tan, who took over in March. 知识点:semiconductor /ˌsemikənˈdʌktə(r)/ n. a substance that has electrical conductivity between that of a conductor and an insulator. 半导体(一种导电性能介于导体和绝缘体之间的物质 ) • Semiconductors are widely used in the production of electronic devices like computers and smartphones.(半导体广泛应用于电脑、智能手机等电子设备的制造中。 ) 获取外刊的完整原文以及精讲笔记,请关注微信公众号「早安英文」,回复“外刊”即可。更多有意思的英语干货等着你! 【节目介绍】 《早安英文-每日外刊精读》,带你精读最新外刊,了解国际最热事件:分析语法结构,拆解长难句,最接地气的翻译,还有重点词汇讲解。 所有选题均来自于《经济学人》《纽约时报》《华尔街日报》《华盛顿邮报》《大西洋月刊》《科学杂志》《国家地理》等国际一线外刊。 【适合谁听】 1、关注时事热点新闻,想要学习最新最潮流英文表达的英文学习者 2、任何想通过地道英文提高听、说、读、写能力的英文学习者 3、想快速掌握表达,有出国学习和旅游计划的英语爱好者 4、参加各类英语考试的应试者(如大学英语四六级、托福雅思、考研等) 【你将获得】 1、超过1000篇外刊精读课程,拓展丰富语言表达和文化背景 2、逐词、逐句精确讲解,系统掌握英语词汇、听力、阅读和语法 3、每期内附学习笔记,包含全文注释、长难句解析、疑难语法点等,帮助扫除阅读障碍。
The Robert Noyce program supports talented science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) undergraduate majors and professionals to become effective K-12 STEM teachers. It also supports experienced, exemplary K-12 STEM teachers to become teacher leaders who continue as classroom teachers in high-need school districts. Each year the Southeast Regional Noyce Conference hosts recipients of the funding to network and to learn about new and innovative STEM teaching practices. In this special edition of Sincerely, South, Dr. Joe Gaston talks with Noyce scholars, teachers, and program personnel from throughout the southeast region. Tune in as they share their stories of growth and as they recount how the Noyce program has made a difference in their lives and in the lives of their students. Hear from first-generation college students, seasoned STEM professionals, and teacher leaders about their experiences with NSF Noyce.If you or someone you know is interested in becoming a STEM teacher through the NSF program contact Dr. Susan Ferguson (ferguson@southalabama.edu) or Dr. Katie Guffey-McCorrision (skguffey@southalabama.edu).
Yes! It is, but under certain circumstances it is not. This episode explores the power of the liberal arts under the right conditions and those circumstances where it would not be worth it.We'll explore differential sibling outcomes, the limitations of awareness versus applying, micro-versus macro, offering a solution versus doing it, the limitations of "practical", Robert Noyce (inventor of microchip), and the virtues of a deep dive after an exploration of multiple areas.If you have a young person exploring liberal arts, this is the episode for you.
Konu bilgisayarların tarihi olduğunda hep bir en birinci kimdi rekabetinin ortasında buluyoruz kendimizi. Fakat bu kavgaların dışında birbiriyle daha iyisini yapmak için rekabet eden devler de var. Ki esas farkı yaratanlar da onlar oluyor. Onlar sayesinde “bir tıkla” tüm dünya parmaklarımızın ucunda artık. Bilgisayarların tarihinin ikinci bölümünde, o bir “tıka” nasıl geldiğimiz üzerine konuşacağız. Bugün cebimize sığan teknolojinin gelişimine tanık olacağız. Ve bölümün sonunda şunu çok net bir şekilde anlayacağız aslında: Her şeyin bu kadar kolay olması, hiç de kolay olmadı.Dijital sağlık platformu Eczacıbaşı Evital ile alanlarında uzman psikolog ve diyetisyenlerle internetin olduğu her yerden online görüşmelerinizi hemen yapabilirsiniz. Ücretsiz ön görüşme fırsatına ek olarak görüşmelerinizi %25 indirimle planlamak için PODBEE25 kodunu kullanabilirsiniz. Evital'i deneyimlemek için hemen tıklayınSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
A heroine goes back in time to a sticky-fingered situation.By Mark V Sharp, in 2 parts. Listen to the ► Podcast at Steamy Stories. "In her, shoot fast," Principal Chief Massasoit directed, using what words he knew so that he would not surprise or confuse his strange hosts, "I want in her, my first use to take.""First use?!" Miss Americana managed to whimper, in horror, in between the moans and yelps Squanto's big thrusting cock was forcing out of her. But she didn't have long to contemplate that."That is no problem at all, my lord!" Squanto replied. Relaxing himself he thrust his enormous hardened cock deep into Miss Americana and, with a groan of ecstasy, unleashed his potent Pawtuxet seed upon her defenseless womb."Oh, Great Justice!" Americana groaned, her eyes rolling up in her head, as she felt the pulsing of his great cock inside her, and knew it meant that his sperm was flooding into her.He pulled out and then stepped aside, his long cock dripping."I have lubricated her for you, my Sachem," he said, gesturing towards Americana's cunt, which, gaping slightly wider than before, was also already releasing a long tendril of his semen to dangle down between her thighs."Very good!" Massasoit said. He stepped forward and took up his own position behind her. Reaching out he stroked her toned bubble-ass, and shook his head. "This," he said, squeezing Americana's bulging silky cheeks, "is a very rich gift, indeed!"With that he pushed himself up against her leaking cunt, and also entered her."Oh, my God," Miss Americana whimpered, as she too discovered Squanto was not to be a unique case. Her entire body shivered, as the great chief's enormous copper-colored cock sank deep up inside her helplessly quivering cunt."That's a sin!" one of the Pilgrims sitting near her chided, and continued eagerly to watch.At the sight that their chief had accepted the gift and that peace had been restored, the waiting column of Wampanoag warriors let out a great whoop of glee. Then, hoisting their burdens, they marched into the Plymouth settlement. The Pilgrims greeted them warmly, food was handed out, the Pilgrims contributing their meager stocks of beer and bread to the natives' largesse. Soon the great feast was in progress, with Wampanoag and Pilgrim dining and chatting together, sampling the first dishes as the Pilgrim women and their daughters and servants worked to prepare the main courses.And through it all, bent over at one end of the great table at which the First Thanksgiving was being laid, Miss Americana continued to get nailed. Massasoit's great cock, in his eagerness, lasted only slightly longer than Squanto had. But there was plenty more where that had come from. He was followed by Samoset, the Sagamore of the Abanaki tribe, who kept closer tabs on the strange new colonists while the Sachem was busy with other matters. After Samoset, the Sachem's honor guard took their turns; and after they had finished, every warrior in the entire column came up one by one and also partook in Miss Americana's flesh.The Pilgrims, with their Godly morals, piously abstained, but this did not stop the Pilgrim men's faces from showing deep jealousy, that their native guests got to enjoy two great helpings of Thanks-giving bounty instead of just one.In between their own turns upon Miss Americana's body, Massasoit, Squanto, and Samoset took their own seats at the table of the Elders, and with it, a privileged view of the action up between Americana's muscular shivering thighs, as the pale-skinned beauty got nailed by one long uncut native cock after another after another. Between her spread thighs they could also see her enormous breasts hanging down low and swaying wildly over the table as she squealed and squirmed under her furious and unchecked invasions, as if her enormous milk-filled udders were blessing the heavily-laden table with their own generous bounty."Does this disturb you, Pilgrim?" one native who had also picked up some English asked. Sitting down after his own turn inside her he found an open seat before Americana's enormous swaying udders, smoking a post-coital pipe. "I thought your God does not approve of this sort of thing."The Pilgrim shook his head. "Nah," he said. "God makes everyone for a purpose. I think it's pretty clear what he made this one for."Then, leaning forward, the Pilgrim seized one of Americana's giant breasts and held his glass up under it. He squeezed, discharging a rich squirt of milk from the heroine's hanging fruits into his cup. He took the cup back, threw it back, and then licked some of the delicious white super-milk off his lips."Well, that and this!" he said, as he held the glass up.Seeing yet another way in which the mysterious woman could be used in a celebration of plenty, other Pilgrims soon came forward to also eagerly sample the fuck-quivering cow's produce. Americana, too busy squealing as she got nailed by one big native cock after another, could do nothing to resist as her big breasts were squeezed and squeezed until finally even those bottomless udders were drained dry.Eventually, the entire feast had been consumed and everyone was full and sated. Even Americana's belt-boosted strength eventually failed her, and after eighty or so consecutive fucks up against the table her knees finally buckled and she sank down, a quivering wreck. She had taken so much cum inside her that rivers seemed to flow down her thighs, and a huge puddle had formed, which her knees landed in with twin pearly splashes like comets entering an ocean of gooey white fluid.But though she was spent, she had not even begun to exhaust the collective vigor of the Wampanoag delegation. Flipping her over, the warriors positioned her on her back at the edge of the First Thanksgiving table, which, the feast having been largely consumed, was now otherwise covered in a great mass of empty used bowls, plates, and tableware. Then, having positioned her, they continued nailing her almost-limp body face-to-face upon the table, as, around them, the dessert course finally began to be served.The tight order of the early stages of the feast had by now broken down, and Elder and commoner, Indian and Pilgrim were now all mixing freely. Copious quantities of beer had also flowed along with the food, and everyone was now quite contentedly drunk, as while the Puritans were against many things, booze was not actually one of them."I say Reverend," the short Pilgrim commented to William Brewster, as they stood side by side near the entrance of a house and watched Americana's continuing show. "Everyone has eaten their full, except for the harem girl. It seems rather unsuited to a great Thanksgiving like this to leave one, even a harlot and serial adulteress such as she, unsated.""True," the Reverend said. "But the food has already been cleared. What is there for her to eat?""There is, one set of sausages that have not been touched," the tall Pilgrim said, finally dropping what they were angling for. "I know that putting them where the Indians are putting theirs is a sin, but what about her mouth. Does that, you know, count?""Hmm," the Reverend Brewster said. "Normally I would say yes. However, this is a special festive day, and she was clearly sent by Providence itself to perform exactly this, function, so perhaps, just once." As he saw the brightening expressions on the two Pilgrims' faces, he shook his head, and raised a chiding finger. "However, for the sake of the harmony of our settlement," he added, "it is not just God who must be consulted."As it happened, the Reverend's own wife was at that moment emerging from the house behind them, carrying two freshly-baked pies. The Reverend's sons, Truelove Brewster and Wrestling Brewster, trailed behind her, carrying another pie each."What say you, Mary?" the Reverend asked her, knowing full well her sharp ears would have overheard everything."Hmm," Mary Brewster said. She glanced at the other Pilgrim wives scattered about the festival, of which there were not many. Between the composition of the original complement of settlers and the terrible toll of deaths that had occurred over the previous winter, there were now a great deal more men than women in the colony. The few other wives looked at her, significantly, saying nothing but their expressions communicating much. Nodding with understanding, Mary turned back to her husband."I know that men build up a great deal of, pressure, if they are not given release," she said. "So, I would say it is fine if the unmarried or widowed men sate themselves while sating the whore. It might reduce, future problems. But the married men will be sated by their wives, or else!" She lifted up a finger and glared."Of course," Reverend Brewster said. He could not quite keep the disappointment out of his voice that he would not be among those allowed to partake.But before he could give general approval for the new plan, Mary caught one of the other wives widening her eyes to get her attention. The silent wife nodded a couple times, significantly, towards Americana's moaning lips, and then looked at Mary meaningfully. Mary nodded."There is one other condition," she added, hastily. "We good women of the colony have had to endure our husbands watching the whore get nailed, in silence. We have done so, for the future of our settlement. However, we must get compensated." She looked at her husband, her eyes boring into him. "So after the unmarried men have fed her their main course, we will feed her dessert, of the pies we have long had prepared between our legs, but rarely if ever had eaten. Is this clear?"The two junior Pilgrims' eyes widened, as if they had never imagined such a thing."Good heavens!" the tall one said, fingers going to his own lips."Is, is that permitted under Heaven's law, Reverend?" the short one asked."Uh," Reverend Brewster said. He wracked his memory of the Good Book, trying to think of a clear passage one way or the other. "To be honest," he said, "I'm not sure if the Good Lord considers that sex, or not,""Then there should be no problem, should there?" Mary asked testily."I guess not," he said, deciding to err on the side of marital harmony over strict doctrine for once. God's forgiveness, after all, was infinite. His wife's, on the other hand,Of course, before the natives 'peace offering' could be used in this manner, clearance first had to be gotten from Massasoit. But the Great Sachem, in a very relaxed state having thoroughly drained his own scrotum over the course of five separate sessions within Miss Americana, was in a magnanimous mood, and with a simple nod of his bronzed head and wave of his hand signaled his approval.So it was that as the pies got laid out, cut, and consumption began eagerly, one by one Pilgrim men began to ascend the table. As with the Indians, they went in strict order of rank, and, his own wife Rose being one of the casualties of the previous winter, this meant that Myles Standish was first in line."Open wide, and say your grace," he advised her, as having preemptively removed his pants, he came in for a landing on her moaning tongue.Miss Americana whimpered loudly as his cock entered her mouth. Pure instinct took over almost immediately. Wrapping her lips tight around his respectable but, compared to some of the monsters that had been in her cunt that day, modestly-sized cock, she began to suck it enthusiastically."Oh, yes!" Myles said. He lifted his eyes heavenward, as she slurped and slurped upon him. "T-truly, this wench was sent by the Lord!" he said, before erupting down her throat and giving her, her first load of cum to swallow.It would, of course, not be the last. As the lesser Pilgrims had pointed out, while everyone else had had their fill, at this First Thanksgiving Americana had had none. Now, they made up for that. One after another, unmarried Pilgrim men climbed up and, sometimes still eating pieces of pie as they did so, inserted their fresh sausages down between her lips. Americana moaned, and blushed, and sucked each one as vigorously and worshipfully as she could, as if they were truly her gifts from God. One warm protein shake after another poured down her throat, finally filling up her until-now-empty belly, and each and every one she gulped down with a vigor equal to the holiday. Then after each one finished she opened wide and, extending out her tongue, began putting preparatory licks upon the next incoming cock that inevitably replaced the last one in the never-ending cornucopia of cock she was being served.In the meantime, watching all this, and knowing that based on Mary Brewster's pronouncement they would not get their own full Thanksgiving repast any other way, one by one the married Pilgrim men snuck away from the party with their now equally enthused and eager wives, into the bushes or the backs of the more remote houses, to do what married couples do. Although, given the inspirations provided by Americana's marathon performance, they generally put a little more effort and creativity into it than they typically had. One by one, flush-faced and hand-in-hand they returned to the center of the festival, in a few cases with the seeds of another few thousand modern descendants quietly germinating under the Pilgrim women's' hastily re-lowered skirts.So it was that, when the Pilgrim men and the natives alike had finally sated themselves, well after the dessert course and into the after-meal drinking and general turkey-clobbered lethargy, Americana got her final surprise. With the coast finally clear, the Pilgrim wives climbed up one by one and got the 'compensation' that Mary Brewster had negotiated for them. As they lifted their skirts and lowered their unkempt bushes down towards the invading harlot's open gasping lips, Americana moaned to discover, one after another, that there was a pie of fresh cream waiting for her under each and every skirt, to accompany the gutted pumpkin and other pies lying spent all around her.But she didn't have much choice. Digging her tongue up between the wives' outer lips, she did her best to show them how it was done."Oh!" one Pilgrim woman after another sighed, heads rolling and shivering, as they discovered at the tip of the 'harem girl's' practiced tongue a pleasure their husbands had rarely, if ever, managed to provide them. Americana was not by nature a cunt-eater, but she had been put into that position often enough by triumphant villainesses to know her way around. She stroked the inner lips, teased the hood, and then finally went after the excited clit with vigor. And as she did so, streamers and tendrils of married Pilgrim cum poured out into her own mouth, which, like all the others before her, she periodically paused to gulp down hungrily before resuming her probing services.Finally, the last dish of all, the one between the legs of Mary Brewster herself, was served to her. As she stroked and stroked between Mary's labia, and felt the Reverend's hallowed semen wash down her tongue, Americana heard her ear-ring microphone crackle."Just so you know, Miss Americana," she heard Flag Girl's voice say, excitedly, "the semen you are currently eating will give rise to at least one Nobel Prize recipient, several Oscar-winning actresses and actors, one Supreme Court Justice, several Governors and Senators, a bunch of highly decorated Admirals in the U.S. Navy, and one President." The events she was getting to witness through the professor's Time Viewer were inspiring an interest in history the airheaded sidekick had never felt before, and she was eagerly scrolling through the lists of descendants of the various people her mentor was getting fucked by. "Isn't that cool?!" Americana heard her squeal.Americana whimpered. "Wonderful," she managed to moan into Mary Brewster's cunt, and with a lap of her tongue, sent more thrillingly historically-significant semen running down her throat.At last even the Pilgrim women had had their fill of serving up themselves, and receiving the novel pleasures of the harem girl's tongue in return. With Pilgrim and native alike now full and tired, they all started to decamp. The Pilgrims wandered back into their homes. The native leaders had had a few dwellings set aside for them, and the rest would make camp just outside the settlement.As the throng began to disperse, Governor Bradford, Squanto, and Massasoit stood side-by-side, surveying what was left of the Pilgrims' 'peace offering'.Americana lay sprawled upon the Thanksgiving table, as utterly and thoroughly consumed as any of the empty dishes all around her. She was not unconscious, but her blue eyes stared glassily up at the sky and didn't seem to see anything. She still had her belt, no one knowing to try to take it off of her, but despite that no muscle of her mighty curvy body seemed capable of movement, save for the slow rise and fall of her huge breasts as she breathed. Rivers of cum seemed to pour out of her cunt, spilling down in waterfalls between the planks of the table to form a vast growing lake underneath it."Shall we clean this mess up?" Governor Bradford asked, nodding towards Miss Americana.Without waiting for his interpreter, Massasoit shook his head. "No need," he said."It can wait until morning," Squanto assured him, smirking at the sight of the sprawled fucked-out white harlot. "Everyone is very tired and content.""Especially her!" Massasoit said, and tilting his head back let out a booming laugh."Should we post a guard on her then?" Governor Bradford asked.Massasoit again shook his head."The Sachem's warriors watch well all the approaches through the woods," Squanto advised. "No enemy tribe will enter here to take her. As for her, look at her. Do you think she can even walk at this point, let alone outrun the finest hunters of the Wampanoag people?""Good point," Governor Bradford admitted. "So, in that case, I have a small stash of brandy left. Shall we share some?"At this Massasoit tilted his head back and laughed vigorously. "Now this, is a good idea!" he said.With that the two natives and the Pilgrim turned and proceeded to the Governor's house, to continue their conversation.Americana was left alone, lying spent on the First Thanksgiving table. Soon all around her was quiet, save for the distant sound of a couple married Pilgrims getting in a second round. Panting, she stared at the stars, still in shock. Occasionally her gloved fingers twitched, down beside her wide and absurdly well-filled hips. Other than that, huge buns squished against the rough-hewn planks of the table, and huge tits rising and falling in the cool Massachusetts night, she could make no other move.At last, everyone nearby had either left or fallen asleep, and the coast was clear. Miss Americana's body began to glow. Her bikini, having been passed around and marveled at by various members of the party before being finally added as decorative elements to the top of the main centerpiece, glowed as well. Her chain, which had been secured to one leg of the table some time ago, did not.With a flash she was gone, leaving the Plymouth colony as mysteriously as she had entered it. The chain, disturbed by the wind of her passage, clanked to the ground. Pilgrims and natives alike would find it empty in the morning and assume that against all odds the 'harem girl' had managed to slip away in the night, and was probably therefore a witch after all. But, having already gotten very full use of her cunt, and since the blame for this could only rest primarily on his own sleepy sentries, Massasoit would not fault the Pilgrims for this and the treaty would not again be endangered. History, such as it was, for better or worse, was saved.Back in the current time, Flag Girl stood by, shivering nervously, as she watched the professor work the controls. A shining form slowly appeared upon the platform, a sprawled and shapely silhouette laid out spread-eagled atop it. Two smaller blobs appeared beside her, for her retrieved bra and panties.Then, with a last flash, the reverse time passage was complete. The machine hummed down, as Miss Americana and her discarded costume lay quivering upon the platform, once more in the flesh."Oh, thank the Goddess!" Flag Girl gasped, rushing forward in relief. Then, halfway to embracing her mistress, she suddenly gasped, skidded to a halt and froze. "Wha-what?" she gasped."Oh, yes," the Professor said. Looking down upon Americana from the control station beside the platform, he scratched his head sheepishly. "Yes, sometimes the time particles have, odd effects like this."Upon the platform Miss Americana groaned. Having recovered some of her strength and energy during the passage back, she lifted her head. She gasped, her curvy naked body rolling back and forth upon the platform, as rivers of semen continued to drip off it. Then, lifting one hand up to hold her head, she raised the other to comfortingly caress her aching belly, and then suddenly let out a loud yelp."Wha- what the?!" Miss Americana gasped.Lifting up her trembling gloved hand, she raised her head and stared down between her breasts in shock. There, rising up before her, which her fingers had unexpectedly encountered, her once-flat belly had already started to swell upwards considerably. She was six or seven months' pregnant, at least."Oh, Gah-Great Justice!" Miss Americana groaned, staring at her own enormous belly in disbelief."What, what happened?" Flag Girl squealed, hands over her lips."As I said," the professor said. Picking up a hand-held bio-scanner, he leaned over and began using it to examine Miss Americana's swollen belly. "The time-stream can have, odd effects sometimes. The exterior didn't age a day, if the still-runny and viable state of all this semen is any indication. The inside, well," He shrugged.Miss Americana shook her head, eyes glued to her impregnated body. As the Professor had stated, despite the advanced state of her pregnancy, streamers of seemingly fresh and gooey cum continued to flow out of her ravaged cunt lips, down onto the platform, spreading around her buxom buns."There's, there's no way my sonic device can deal with this," she whimpered. "Could you get me to Doctor Lingam fast? Maybe, maybe she could still fix this for me.""Maybe," the Professor admitted, still studying his scanner. "The time particles may make that more complicated than expected. But regardless of one's normal feelings on that practice, I think it might be considered a particularly sticky matter in this case, regardless.""What, what are you talking about, Professor?" the Queen of Justice gasped.He pointed at his scanner readout. "The other half of the genetic material in your womb matches no known human bloodline," he said. "Do you know what that means?"Miss Americana shook her head, glaring up at him furiously. "No of course not!" she said. "But since it's god-damn inside of me, just tell me!""The Native American known as Squanto," the Professor said, still looking over his readings with clinical detachment, "he was the one who had the first crack at your cunt, correct? And he was among the longest of those who fucked you, based on what we saw on the viewer, so if anyone's sperm reached your egg first, it was probably his. Correct?""Yes!" Americana said. She squirmed in particular, at the mention of the native interpreter's long cock, as it promptly dragged up deep memories of what it had felt like inside her. "Get to the point!" she said, naming an activity that none of the natives who had fucked her, least of all Squanto himself, had had any trouble at all doing within her."Well," he said. "In history as we previously understood it, the Pawtuxet tribe was entirely wiped out by disease save for one survivor. That would be Squanto. History tells us that he succumbed to European diseases himself shortly after the First Thanksgiving, and fathered no known children, thus making him the very last of his people."Turning it around, he showed her the readings on his bio-scanner."Until now," he said.Americana stared at the readings on the scanner in shock. In addition to all the genetic readings it also revealed to her that Squanto had gotten a jump on repopulating his tribe in another way as well. It wasn't one baby inside her, it was twins. Both boys. She turned and looked at her impregnated belly. Then she looked back at the scanner."Oh, oh shit," she whispered softly.Flag Girl suddenly started bouncing eagerly on her heels, having finally processed with her limited teen brainpower what the adults were talking about. "Oh, yay, Miss A!" she squealed. "You're going to be, like, the step-mother of an entire nation! Isn't that so cool?"Her face shivering in horror and wonder behind her star-spangled patriotic mask, Miss Americana shivered. "Oh, oh my fucking God!" she moaned.Overcome by the implications, she slumped back down onto the platform, her buxom naked body once more too overcome by what was happening to it to rise at all. Quivering against the floor, she shook and gasped in disbelief, as the seed of a vanished people suddenly re-birthed after a four-hundred-year absence continued to germinate eagerly within her patriotic womb.Back in the past, Governor Bradford had passed out in his chair. On a paper beside him, he had already taken some hasty notes about how the day's events could be carefully edited in the colonial records to preserve decorum. Massasoit and Tisquantum, still holding glasses of the governor's best brandy, had wandered to the outskirts of the colony. The escape of the busty peace offering had not yet been discovered. Sitting down on the side on a large rock by the shore they observed the light of the moon on the harbor in which the strangers had first arrived.'Does it ever disturb you,' Massasoit suddenly asked, in the Wampanoag tongue, 'to have to teach these people to live atop the graves of your tribe?''Sometimes' Tisquantum admitted. 'But I must do what is best for my people, and I trust you see that better than me.''I hope that I do,' Massasoit said. 'Being Sachem is not restful. I do sympathize though. The ghosts that dwell here cannot give you much rest either.'Looking out over the shining harbor Tisquantum thought back to playing upon this very rock as a child. He thought about the teenage girl he had courted, upon the hill above, who, as it turned out, he had never gotten to make his wife. He knew what remained of her was under a tree not far away, and visited it occasionally when no one else was watching.But, because it was so recent, he could also not help but remember the peace offering's cunt squeezing tight around his cock as he unleashed his seed into her.'It's alright,' he said. 'They just got a very tiny bit quieter for some reason.'Beside him, Massasoit let out a tiny bark of laughter. 'Yes, I'll bet!' he said.Then, raising their glasses of brandy, they chuckled as they each enjoyed a sip while looking out over the shining sea to the distant horizon.By Mark V Sharp for Literotica.Historical Characters:Massasoit, Sachem (essentially chief-over-other-chiefs) of the Wampanoag Confederacy, which dominated much of the land around the Plymouth settlement. Historically he signed a peace treaty with Governor John Carver in early 1621 that would last for nearly a century. He was also the one who sent Squanto to act as their interpreter and advisor. The land the colony was built on had been occupied by one of the tribes of his confederacy which, save for Squanto, had been entirely wiped out by disease. Without his help, including repeated deliveries of food, it is very unlikely the Plymouth colony would have survived.Tisquantum aka Squanto, last surviving member of the Pawtuxet tribe, whose vacant village the Pilgrims essentially settled on top of. The entire rest of the tribe was wiped out by a sudden outbreak of disease a few years before their arrival, most likely smallpox; Squanto escaped this fate by being kidnapped by an English explorer and sold into slavery in Spain, during which time he learned English. Eventually returning to his native land he was sent by Massasoit as the ambassador to his new white allies, and according to legend assisted the Pilgrims greatly in learning to survive in their new home. In actual history he would die of disease in 1622, a year after the so-called 'First Thanksgiving', leaving no known issue.William Brewster, though in reality the English Dissenters were a relatively egalitarian lot that rejected formal religious authorities, William Brewster is generally recognized as the chief spiritual leader and authority of the early colony. I just titled him 'Reverend' for simplicity's sake. Like many of the Pilgrims William Brewster has tens of thousands of known latter-day or modern-day descendants, but his list is particularly impressive including John Foster Dulles, Richard Gere, Katherine Hepburn, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Sarah Palin, Nelson Rockefeller, Supreme Court Justice David Souter, Commodore Matthew Perry (the dude who 'opened' Japan), Robert Noyce (the inventor of the integrated circuit), World War 2 Admiral William 'Bull' Halsey, and President Zachary Taylor.Mary Brewster, William Brewster's wife and mother of his children. I have no historical information that Mary Brewster had the slightest interest in receiving cunnilingus from other women; on the other hand I also don't have any hard information that she didn't.Truelove Brewster and Wrestling Brewster: no, really, these are the actual names William Brewster gave his sons. Also named his daughter 'Fear'.William Bradford, second Governor of the Plymouth Colony, after the first governor John Carver died of disease early in 1621. His journal, titled 'Of Plymouth Plantation,' is one of the primary historical sources on the early colony, including the First Thanksgiving. His descendants include Alec Baldwin, Clint Eastwood, Christopher Reeve, and Noah Webster, of 'Webster's Dictionary' fame. Unfortunately, William Bradford named his sons boring things like 'William Jr.' and 'Joseph' instead of the bat-shit awesome stuff William Brewster came up with, so I didn't give them any cameos.Myles Standish, hired by the Merchant Adventurers (non-religious monetary backers of the Mayflower expedition who were in it for potential trading profits) as a military advisor; Myles was not a Puritan, but was instead a career military man and veteran of warfare against the Spanish in Holland. However, he still was one of the signatories to the Mayflower Compact.
A heroine goes back in time to a sticky-fingered situation.By Mark V Sharp, in 2 parts. Listen to the ► Podcast at Steamy Stories. "In her, shoot fast," Principal Chief Massasoit directed, using what words he knew so that he would not surprise or confuse his strange hosts, "I want in her, my first use to take.""First use?!" Miss Americana managed to whimper, in horror, in between the moans and yelps Squanto's big thrusting cock was forcing out of her. But she didn't have long to contemplate that."That is no problem at all, my lord!" Squanto replied. Relaxing himself he thrust his enormous hardened cock deep into Miss Americana and, with a groan of ecstasy, unleashed his potent Pawtuxet seed upon her defenseless womb."Oh, Great Justice!" Americana groaned, her eyes rolling up in her head, as she felt the pulsing of his great cock inside her, and knew it meant that his sperm was flooding into her.He pulled out and then stepped aside, his long cock dripping."I have lubricated her for you, my Sachem," he said, gesturing towards Americana's cunt, which, gaping slightly wider than before, was also already releasing a long tendril of his semen to dangle down between her thighs."Very good!" Massasoit said. He stepped forward and took up his own position behind her. Reaching out he stroked her toned bubble-ass, and shook his head. "This," he said, squeezing Americana's bulging silky cheeks, "is a very rich gift, indeed!"With that he pushed himself up against her leaking cunt, and also entered her."Oh, my God," Miss Americana whimpered, as she too discovered Squanto was not to be a unique case. Her entire body shivered, as the great chief's enormous copper-colored cock sank deep up inside her helplessly quivering cunt."That's a sin!" one of the Pilgrims sitting near her chided, and continued eagerly to watch.At the sight that their chief had accepted the gift and that peace had been restored, the waiting column of Wampanoag warriors let out a great whoop of glee. Then, hoisting their burdens, they marched into the Plymouth settlement. The Pilgrims greeted them warmly, food was handed out, the Pilgrims contributing their meager stocks of beer and bread to the natives' largesse. Soon the great feast was in progress, with Wampanoag and Pilgrim dining and chatting together, sampling the first dishes as the Pilgrim women and their daughters and servants worked to prepare the main courses.And through it all, bent over at one end of the great table at which the First Thanksgiving was being laid, Miss Americana continued to get nailed. Massasoit's great cock, in his eagerness, lasted only slightly longer than Squanto had. But there was plenty more where that had come from. He was followed by Samoset, the Sagamore of the Abanaki tribe, who kept closer tabs on the strange new colonists while the Sachem was busy with other matters. After Samoset, the Sachem's honor guard took their turns; and after they had finished, every warrior in the entire column came up one by one and also partook in Miss Americana's flesh.The Pilgrims, with their Godly morals, piously abstained, but this did not stop the Pilgrim men's faces from showing deep jealousy, that their native guests got to enjoy two great helpings of Thanks-giving bounty instead of just one.In between their own turns upon Miss Americana's body, Massasoit, Squanto, and Samoset took their own seats at the table of the Elders, and with it, a privileged view of the action up between Americana's muscular shivering thighs, as the pale-skinned beauty got nailed by one long uncut native cock after another after another. Between her spread thighs they could also see her enormous breasts hanging down low and swaying wildly over the table as she squealed and squirmed under her furious and unchecked invasions, as if her enormous milk-filled udders were blessing the heavily-laden table with their own generous bounty."Does this disturb you, Pilgrim?" one native who had also picked up some English asked. Sitting down after his own turn inside her he found an open seat before Americana's enormous swaying udders, smoking a post-coital pipe. "I thought your God does not approve of this sort of thing."The Pilgrim shook his head. "Nah," he said. "God makes everyone for a purpose. I think it's pretty clear what he made this one for."Then, leaning forward, the Pilgrim seized one of Americana's giant breasts and held his glass up under it. He squeezed, discharging a rich squirt of milk from the heroine's hanging fruits into his cup. He took the cup back, threw it back, and then licked some of the delicious white super-milk off his lips."Well, that and this!" he said, as he held the glass up.Seeing yet another way in which the mysterious woman could be used in a celebration of plenty, other Pilgrims soon came forward to also eagerly sample the fuck-quivering cow's produce. Americana, too busy squealing as she got nailed by one big native cock after another, could do nothing to resist as her big breasts were squeezed and squeezed until finally even those bottomless udders were drained dry.Eventually, the entire feast had been consumed and everyone was full and sated. Even Americana's belt-boosted strength eventually failed her, and after eighty or so consecutive fucks up against the table her knees finally buckled and she sank down, a quivering wreck. She had taken so much cum inside her that rivers seemed to flow down her thighs, and a huge puddle had formed, which her knees landed in with twin pearly splashes like comets entering an ocean of gooey white fluid.But though she was spent, she had not even begun to exhaust the collective vigor of the Wampanoag delegation. Flipping her over, the warriors positioned her on her back at the edge of the First Thanksgiving table, which, the feast having been largely consumed, was now otherwise covered in a great mass of empty used bowls, plates, and tableware. Then, having positioned her, they continued nailing her almost-limp body face-to-face upon the table, as, around them, the dessert course finally began to be served.The tight order of the early stages of the feast had by now broken down, and Elder and commoner, Indian and Pilgrim were now all mixing freely. Copious quantities of beer had also flowed along with the food, and everyone was now quite contentedly drunk, as while the Puritans were against many things, booze was not actually one of them."I say Reverend," the short Pilgrim commented to William Brewster, as they stood side by side near the entrance of a house and watched Americana's continuing show. "Everyone has eaten their full, except for the harem girl. It seems rather unsuited to a great Thanksgiving like this to leave one, even a harlot and serial adulteress such as she, unsated.""True," the Reverend said. "But the food has already been cleared. What is there for her to eat?""There is, one set of sausages that have not been touched," the tall Pilgrim said, finally dropping what they were angling for. "I know that putting them where the Indians are putting theirs is a sin, but what about her mouth. Does that, you know, count?""Hmm," the Reverend Brewster said. "Normally I would say yes. However, this is a special festive day, and she was clearly sent by Providence itself to perform exactly this, function, so perhaps, just once." As he saw the brightening expressions on the two Pilgrims' faces, he shook his head, and raised a chiding finger. "However, for the sake of the harmony of our settlement," he added, "it is not just God who must be consulted."As it happened, the Reverend's own wife was at that moment emerging from the house behind them, carrying two freshly-baked pies. The Reverend's sons, Truelove Brewster and Wrestling Brewster, trailed behind her, carrying another pie each."What say you, Mary?" the Reverend asked her, knowing full well her sharp ears would have overheard everything."Hmm," Mary Brewster said. She glanced at the other Pilgrim wives scattered about the festival, of which there were not many. Between the composition of the original complement of settlers and the terrible toll of deaths that had occurred over the previous winter, there were now a great deal more men than women in the colony. The few other wives looked at her, significantly, saying nothing but their expressions communicating much. Nodding with understanding, Mary turned back to her husband."I know that men build up a great deal of, pressure, if they are not given release," she said. "So, I would say it is fine if the unmarried or widowed men sate themselves while sating the whore. It might reduce, future problems. But the married men will be sated by their wives, or else!" She lifted up a finger and glared."Of course," Reverend Brewster said. He could not quite keep the disappointment out of his voice that he would not be among those allowed to partake.But before he could give general approval for the new plan, Mary caught one of the other wives widening her eyes to get her attention. The silent wife nodded a couple times, significantly, towards Americana's moaning lips, and then looked at Mary meaningfully. Mary nodded."There is one other condition," she added, hastily. "We good women of the colony have had to endure our husbands watching the whore get nailed, in silence. We have done so, for the future of our settlement. However, we must get compensated." She looked at her husband, her eyes boring into him. "So after the unmarried men have fed her their main course, we will feed her dessert, of the pies we have long had prepared between our legs, but rarely if ever had eaten. Is this clear?"The two junior Pilgrims' eyes widened, as if they had never imagined such a thing."Good heavens!" the tall one said, fingers going to his own lips."Is, is that permitted under Heaven's law, Reverend?" the short one asked."Uh," Reverend Brewster said. He wracked his memory of the Good Book, trying to think of a clear passage one way or the other. "To be honest," he said, "I'm not sure if the Good Lord considers that sex, or not,""Then there should be no problem, should there?" Mary asked testily."I guess not," he said, deciding to err on the side of marital harmony over strict doctrine for once. God's forgiveness, after all, was infinite. His wife's, on the other hand,Of course, before the natives 'peace offering' could be used in this manner, clearance first had to be gotten from Massasoit. But the Great Sachem, in a very relaxed state having thoroughly drained his own scrotum over the course of five separate sessions within Miss Americana, was in a magnanimous mood, and with a simple nod of his bronzed head and wave of his hand signaled his approval.So it was that as the pies got laid out, cut, and consumption began eagerly, one by one Pilgrim men began to ascend the table. As with the Indians, they went in strict order of rank, and, his own wife Rose being one of the casualties of the previous winter, this meant that Myles Standish was first in line."Open wide, and say your grace," he advised her, as having preemptively removed his pants, he came in for a landing on her moaning tongue.Miss Americana whimpered loudly as his cock entered her mouth. Pure instinct took over almost immediately. Wrapping her lips tight around his respectable but, compared to some of the monsters that had been in her cunt that day, modestly-sized cock, she began to suck it enthusiastically."Oh, yes!" Myles said. He lifted his eyes heavenward, as she slurped and slurped upon him. "T-truly, this wench was sent by the Lord!" he said, before erupting down her throat and giving her, her first load of cum to swallow.It would, of course, not be the last. As the lesser Pilgrims had pointed out, while everyone else had had their fill, at this First Thanksgiving Americana had had none. Now, they made up for that. One after another, unmarried Pilgrim men climbed up and, sometimes still eating pieces of pie as they did so, inserted their fresh sausages down between her lips. Americana moaned, and blushed, and sucked each one as vigorously and worshipfully as she could, as if they were truly her gifts from God. One warm protein shake after another poured down her throat, finally filling up her until-now-empty belly, and each and every one she gulped down with a vigor equal to the holiday. Then after each one finished she opened wide and, extending out her tongue, began putting preparatory licks upon the next incoming cock that inevitably replaced the last one in the never-ending cornucopia of cock she was being served.In the meantime, watching all this, and knowing that based on Mary Brewster's pronouncement they would not get their own full Thanksgiving repast any other way, one by one the married Pilgrim men snuck away from the party with their now equally enthused and eager wives, into the bushes or the backs of the more remote houses, to do what married couples do. Although, given the inspirations provided by Americana's marathon performance, they generally put a little more effort and creativity into it than they typically had. One by one, flush-faced and hand-in-hand they returned to the center of the festival, in a few cases with the seeds of another few thousand modern descendants quietly germinating under the Pilgrim women's' hastily re-lowered skirts.So it was that, when the Pilgrim men and the natives alike had finally sated themselves, well after the dessert course and into the after-meal drinking and general turkey-clobbered lethargy, Americana got her final surprise. With the coast finally clear, the Pilgrim wives climbed up one by one and got the 'compensation' that Mary Brewster had negotiated for them. As they lifted their skirts and lowered their unkempt bushes down towards the invading harlot's open gasping lips, Americana moaned to discover, one after another, that there was a pie of fresh cream waiting for her under each and every skirt, to accompany the gutted pumpkin and other pies lying spent all around her.But she didn't have much choice. Digging her tongue up between the wives' outer lips, she did her best to show them how it was done."Oh!" one Pilgrim woman after another sighed, heads rolling and shivering, as they discovered at the tip of the 'harem girl's' practiced tongue a pleasure their husbands had rarely, if ever, managed to provide them. Americana was not by nature a cunt-eater, but she had been put into that position often enough by triumphant villainesses to know her way around. She stroked the inner lips, teased the hood, and then finally went after the excited clit with vigor. And as she did so, streamers and tendrils of married Pilgrim cum poured out into her own mouth, which, like all the others before her, she periodically paused to gulp down hungrily before resuming her probing services.Finally, the last dish of all, the one between the legs of Mary Brewster herself, was served to her. As she stroked and stroked between Mary's labia, and felt the Reverend's hallowed semen wash down her tongue, Americana heard her ear-ring microphone crackle."Just so you know, Miss Americana," she heard Flag Girl's voice say, excitedly, "the semen you are currently eating will give rise to at least one Nobel Prize recipient, several Oscar-winning actresses and actors, one Supreme Court Justice, several Governors and Senators, a bunch of highly decorated Admirals in the U.S. Navy, and one President." The events she was getting to witness through the professor's Time Viewer were inspiring an interest in history the airheaded sidekick had never felt before, and she was eagerly scrolling through the lists of descendants of the various people her mentor was getting fucked by. "Isn't that cool?!" Americana heard her squeal.Americana whimpered. "Wonderful," she managed to moan into Mary Brewster's cunt, and with a lap of her tongue, sent more thrillingly historically-significant semen running down her throat.At last even the Pilgrim women had had their fill of serving up themselves, and receiving the novel pleasures of the harem girl's tongue in return. With Pilgrim and native alike now full and tired, they all started to decamp. The Pilgrims wandered back into their homes. The native leaders had had a few dwellings set aside for them, and the rest would make camp just outside the settlement.As the throng began to disperse, Governor Bradford, Squanto, and Massasoit stood side-by-side, surveying what was left of the Pilgrims' 'peace offering'.Americana lay sprawled upon the Thanksgiving table, as utterly and thoroughly consumed as any of the empty dishes all around her. She was not unconscious, but her blue eyes stared glassily up at the sky and didn't seem to see anything. She still had her belt, no one knowing to try to take it off of her, but despite that no muscle of her mighty curvy body seemed capable of movement, save for the slow rise and fall of her huge breasts as she breathed. Rivers of cum seemed to pour out of her cunt, spilling down in waterfalls between the planks of the table to form a vast growing lake underneath it."Shall we clean this mess up?" Governor Bradford asked, nodding towards Miss Americana.Without waiting for his interpreter, Massasoit shook his head. "No need," he said."It can wait until morning," Squanto assured him, smirking at the sight of the sprawled fucked-out white harlot. "Everyone is very tired and content.""Especially her!" Massasoit said, and tilting his head back let out a booming laugh."Should we post a guard on her then?" Governor Bradford asked.Massasoit again shook his head."The Sachem's warriors watch well all the approaches through the woods," Squanto advised. "No enemy tribe will enter here to take her. As for her, look at her. Do you think she can even walk at this point, let alone outrun the finest hunters of the Wampanoag people?""Good point," Governor Bradford admitted. "So, in that case, I have a small stash of brandy left. Shall we share some?"At this Massasoit tilted his head back and laughed vigorously. "Now this, is a good idea!" he said.With that the two natives and the Pilgrim turned and proceeded to the Governor's house, to continue their conversation.Americana was left alone, lying spent on the First Thanksgiving table. Soon all around her was quiet, save for the distant sound of a couple married Pilgrims getting in a second round. Panting, she stared at the stars, still in shock. Occasionally her gloved fingers twitched, down beside her wide and absurdly well-filled hips. Other than that, huge buns squished against the rough-hewn planks of the table, and huge tits rising and falling in the cool Massachusetts night, she could make no other move.At last, everyone nearby had either left or fallen asleep, and the coast was clear. Miss Americana's body began to glow. Her bikini, having been passed around and marveled at by various members of the party before being finally added as decorative elements to the top of the main centerpiece, glowed as well. Her chain, which had been secured to one leg of the table some time ago, did not.With a flash she was gone, leaving the Plymouth colony as mysteriously as she had entered it. The chain, disturbed by the wind of her passage, clanked to the ground. Pilgrims and natives alike would find it empty in the morning and assume that against all odds the 'harem girl' had managed to slip away in the night, and was probably therefore a witch after all. But, having already gotten very full use of her cunt, and since the blame for this could only rest primarily on his own sleepy sentries, Massasoit would not fault the Pilgrims for this and the treaty would not again be endangered. History, such as it was, for better or worse, was saved.Back in the current time, Flag Girl stood by, shivering nervously, as she watched the professor work the controls. A shining form slowly appeared upon the platform, a sprawled and shapely silhouette laid out spread-eagled atop it. Two smaller blobs appeared beside her, for her retrieved bra and panties.Then, with a last flash, the reverse time passage was complete. The machine hummed down, as Miss Americana and her discarded costume lay quivering upon the platform, once more in the flesh."Oh, thank the Goddess!" Flag Girl gasped, rushing forward in relief. Then, halfway to embracing her mistress, she suddenly gasped, skidded to a halt and froze. "Wha-what?" she gasped."Oh, yes," the Professor said. Looking down upon Americana from the control station beside the platform, he scratched his head sheepishly. "Yes, sometimes the time particles have, odd effects like this."Upon the platform Miss Americana groaned. Having recovered some of her strength and energy during the passage back, she lifted her head. She gasped, her curvy naked body rolling back and forth upon the platform, as rivers of semen continued to drip off it. Then, lifting one hand up to hold her head, she raised the other to comfortingly caress her aching belly, and then suddenly let out a loud yelp."Wha- what the?!" Miss Americana gasped.Lifting up her trembling gloved hand, she raised her head and stared down between her breasts in shock. There, rising up before her, which her fingers had unexpectedly encountered, her once-flat belly had already started to swell upwards considerably. She was six or seven months' pregnant, at least."Oh, Gah-Great Justice!" Miss Americana groaned, staring at her own enormous belly in disbelief."What, what happened?" Flag Girl squealed, hands over her lips."As I said," the professor said. Picking up a hand-held bio-scanner, he leaned over and began using it to examine Miss Americana's swollen belly. "The time-stream can have, odd effects sometimes. The exterior didn't age a day, if the still-runny and viable state of all this semen is any indication. The inside, well," He shrugged.Miss Americana shook her head, eyes glued to her impregnated body. As the Professor had stated, despite the advanced state of her pregnancy, streamers of seemingly fresh and gooey cum continued to flow out of her ravaged cunt lips, down onto the platform, spreading around her buxom buns."There's, there's no way my sonic device can deal with this," she whimpered. "Could you get me to Doctor Lingam fast? Maybe, maybe she could still fix this for me.""Maybe," the Professor admitted, still studying his scanner. "The time particles may make that more complicated than expected. But regardless of one's normal feelings on that practice, I think it might be considered a particularly sticky matter in this case, regardless.""What, what are you talking about, Professor?" the Queen of Justice gasped.He pointed at his scanner readout. "The other half of the genetic material in your womb matches no known human bloodline," he said. "Do you know what that means?"Miss Americana shook her head, glaring up at him furiously. "No of course not!" she said. "But since it's god-damn inside of me, just tell me!""The Native American known as Squanto," the Professor said, still looking over his readings with clinical detachment, "he was the one who had the first crack at your cunt, correct? And he was among the longest of those who fucked you, based on what we saw on the viewer, so if anyone's sperm reached your egg first, it was probably his. Correct?""Yes!" Americana said. She squirmed in particular, at the mention of the native interpreter's long cock, as it promptly dragged up deep memories of what it had felt like inside her. "Get to the point!" she said, naming an activity that none of the natives who had fucked her, least of all Squanto himself, had had any trouble at all doing within her."Well," he said. "In history as we previously understood it, the Pawtuxet tribe was entirely wiped out by disease save for one survivor. That would be Squanto. History tells us that he succumbed to European diseases himself shortly after the First Thanksgiving, and fathered no known children, thus making him the very last of his people."Turning it around, he showed her the readings on his bio-scanner."Until now," he said.Americana stared at the readings on the scanner in shock. In addition to all the genetic readings it also revealed to her that Squanto had gotten a jump on repopulating his tribe in another way as well. It wasn't one baby inside her, it was twins. Both boys. She turned and looked at her impregnated belly. Then she looked back at the scanner."Oh, oh shit," she whispered softly.Flag Girl suddenly started bouncing eagerly on her heels, having finally processed with her limited teen brainpower what the adults were talking about. "Oh, yay, Miss A!" she squealed. "You're going to be, like, the step-mother of an entire nation! Isn't that so cool?"Her face shivering in horror and wonder behind her star-spangled patriotic mask, Miss Americana shivered. "Oh, oh my fucking God!" she moaned.Overcome by the implications, she slumped back down onto the platform, her buxom naked body once more too overcome by what was happening to it to rise at all. Quivering against the floor, she shook and gasped in disbelief, as the seed of a vanished people suddenly re-birthed after a four-hundred-year absence continued to germinate eagerly within her patriotic womb.Back in the past, Governor Bradford had passed out in his chair. On a paper beside him, he had already taken some hasty notes about how the day's events could be carefully edited in the colonial records to preserve decorum. Massasoit and Tisquantum, still holding glasses of the governor's best brandy, had wandered to the outskirts of the colony. The escape of the busty peace offering had not yet been discovered. Sitting down on the side on a large rock by the shore they observed the light of the moon on the harbor in which the strangers had first arrived.'Does it ever disturb you,' Massasoit suddenly asked, in the Wampanoag tongue, 'to have to teach these people to live atop the graves of your tribe?''Sometimes' Tisquantum admitted. 'But I must do what is best for my people, and I trust you see that better than me.''I hope that I do,' Massasoit said. 'Being Sachem is not restful. I do sympathize though. The ghosts that dwell here cannot give you much rest either.'Looking out over the shining harbor Tisquantum thought back to playing upon this very rock as a child. He thought about the teenage girl he had courted, upon the hill above, who, as it turned out, he had never gotten to make his wife. He knew what remained of her was under a tree not far away, and visited it occasionally when no one else was watching.But, because it was so recent, he could also not help but remember the peace offering's cunt squeezing tight around his cock as he unleashed his seed into her.'It's alright,' he said. 'They just got a very tiny bit quieter for some reason.'Beside him, Massasoit let out a tiny bark of laughter. 'Yes, I'll bet!' he said.Then, raising their glasses of brandy, they chuckled as they each enjoyed a sip while looking out over the shining sea to the distant horizon.By Mark V Sharp for Literotica.Historical Characters:Massasoit, Sachem (essentially chief-over-other-chiefs) of the Wampanoag Confederacy, which dominated much of the land around the Plymouth settlement. Historically he signed a peace treaty with Governor John Carver in early 1621 that would last for nearly a century. He was also the one who sent Squanto to act as their interpreter and advisor. The land the colony was built on had been occupied by one of the tribes of his confederacy which, save for Squanto, had been entirely wiped out by disease. Without his help, including repeated deliveries of food, it is very unlikely the Plymouth colony would have survived.Tisquantum aka Squanto, last surviving member of the Pawtuxet tribe, whose vacant village the Pilgrims essentially settled on top of. The entire rest of the tribe was wiped out by a sudden outbreak of disease a few years before their arrival, most likely smallpox; Squanto escaped this fate by being kidnapped by an English explorer and sold into slavery in Spain, during which time he learned English. Eventually returning to his native land he was sent by Massasoit as the ambassador to his new white allies, and according to legend assisted the Pilgrims greatly in learning to survive in their new home. In actual history he would die of disease in 1622, a year after the so-called 'First Thanksgiving', leaving no known issue.William Brewster, though in reality the English Dissenters were a relatively egalitarian lot that rejected formal religious authorities, William Brewster is generally recognized as the chief spiritual leader and authority of the early colony. I just titled him 'Reverend' for simplicity's sake. Like many of the Pilgrims William Brewster has tens of thousands of known latter-day or modern-day descendants, but his list is particularly impressive including John Foster Dulles, Richard Gere, Katherine Hepburn, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Sarah Palin, Nelson Rockefeller, Supreme Court Justice David Souter, Commodore Matthew Perry (the dude who 'opened' Japan), Robert Noyce (the inventor of the integrated circuit), World War 2 Admiral William 'Bull' Halsey, and President Zachary Taylor.Mary Brewster, William Brewster's wife and mother of his children. I have no historical information that Mary Brewster had the slightest interest in receiving cunnilingus from other women; on the other hand I also don't have any hard information that she didn't.Truelove Brewster and Wrestling Brewster: no, really, these are the actual names William Brewster gave his sons. Also named his daughter 'Fear'.William Bradford, second Governor of the Plymouth Colony, after the first governor John Carver died of disease early in 1621. His journal, titled 'Of Plymouth Plantation,' is one of the primary historical sources on the early colony, including the First Thanksgiving. His descendants include Alec Baldwin, Clint Eastwood, Christopher Reeve, and Noah Webster, of 'Webster's Dictionary' fame. Unfortunately, William Bradford named his sons boring things like 'William Jr.' and 'Joseph' instead of the bat-shit awesome stuff William Brewster came up with, so I didn't give them any cameos.Myles Standish, hired by the Merchant Adventurers (non-religious monetary backers of the Mayflower expedition who were in it for potential trading profits) as a military advisor; Myles was not a Puritan, but was instead a career military man and veteran of warfare against the Spanish in Holland. However, he still was one of the signatories to the Mayflower Compact.
What I learned from reading The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce: How the Sun Rose on Silicon Valley by Tom Wolfe. Read The Intel Trinity: How Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove Built the World's Most Important Company by Michael Malone with me. ----Founders Notes gives you the superpower to learn from history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. You can search all my notes and highlights from every book I've ever read for the podcast. Get access to Founders Notes here. ----Build relationships with other founders, investors, and executives at a Founders Event----(1:00) America is today in the midst of a great technological revolution. With the advent of the silicon chip, information processing, and communications, the national economy have been strikingly altered. The new technology is changing how we live, how we work, how we think. The revolution didn't just happen; it was engineered by a small number of people. Collectively, they engineered Tomorrow. Foremost among them is Robert Noyce.(2:00) Steve Jobs on Robert Noyce: “He was one of the giants in this valley who provided the model and inspiration for everything we wanted to become. He was the ultimate inventor. The ultimate rebel. The ultimate entrepreneur.”(4:00) When you read biographies of people who've done great work, it's remarkable how much luck is involved. They discover what to work on as a result of a chance meeting, or by reading a book they happen to pick up. So you need to make yourself a big target for luck, and the way to do that is to be curious. Try lots of things, meet lots of people, read lots of books, ask lots of questions. — How To Do Great Work by Paul Graham. (Founders #314)(7:00) Bob Noyce had a passion for the scientific grind.(10:00) He had a profound and baffling self-confidence.(15:00) They called Shockley's personalty reverse charisma. — Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, Creator of the Electronic Age by Joel Shurkin. (Founders #165)(25:00) What the beginning of an industry looks like: Anywhere from 50 to 90% of the transistors produced would turn out to be defective.(33:00) Young engineers were giving themselves over to a new technology as if it were a religious mission.(41:00) Noyce's idea was that every employee should feel that he could go as far and as fast in this industry as his talent would take him. He didn't want any employee to look at the structure of Intel and see a complex set of hurdles.(43:00) This wasn't a corporation. It was a congregation.(43:00) There were sermons. At Intel everyone, Noyce included, was expected to attend sessions on "the Intel Culture." At these sessions the principles by which the company was run were spelled out and discussed.(45:00) If you're ambitious and hardworking, you want to be told how you're doing.(45:00) In Noyce's view, most of the young hotshots who were coming to work for Intel had never had the benefit of honest grades in their lives. In the late 1960s and early 1970s college faculties had been under pressure to give all students passing marks so they wouldn't have to go off to Vietnam, and they had caved in, until the entire grading system was meaningless. At Intel they would learn what measuring up meant.(49:00) When you are trying to convince an audience to accept a radical innovation, almost by definition the idea is so far from the status quo that many people simply cannot get their minds around it. They quickly discovered that the marketplace wasn't just confused by the concept of the microprocessor, but was actually frightened by its implications. Many of my engineering friends scoffed at it was a gimmick. Their solution? The market had to be educated. At one point, Intel was conducting more seminars and workshops on how to use the microprocessor than the local junior collage's total catalog of courses. Bob Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove became part of a traveling educational roadshow. Everyone who could walk and talk became educators. It worked. — The Intel Trinity: How Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove Built the World's Most Important Company by Michael Malone. ----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast
Ever wondered how the digital revolution came to be? Was it the work of lone geniuses, or was there something more at play? In this episode, we delve into Walter Isaacson's "The Innovators," uncovering the collaborative efforts and key principles that have shaped our technological landscape.In the world of investing and entrepreneurship, building a multidisciplinary mental model is key to success. "The Innovators" reveals that diverse, collaborative teams have historically been the driving force behind groundbreaking solutions.In my martial arts days, a coach taught me to study exceptional role models – a strategy akin to the famous Harvard Business Cases. Analyze success, discover core principles, then adapt them to your own unique path. After all, as Bruce Lee said, "Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is essentially your own."That's the lens I bring to biographies – extracting valuable lessons amidst the complexities of each individual story.This episode dissects 10 crucial tools for fostering innovation, drawing on stories from the book and my own experiences as an entrepreneur and investor. From visionary thinking and customer-centricity to the power of persistence and collaboration, we'll explore the strategies that can help you identify winning teams and create an environment where innovation thrives.Book on Amazon[Link to Amazon]Problems This Solves:Overwhelmed by history books? This concise summary delivers the most relevant insights for entrepreneurs and investors.Unsure how to apply innovation principles? We'll provide actionable takeaways and reflection questions.Curious about the minds behind the digital age? Gain insights into the collaborative spirit that drives technological progress.Why Listen:Discover the 10 tools for innovation: Uncover the strategies that have fueled successful collaborations and groundbreaking technologies.Learn from real-world examples: Hear stories from the book and my own experiences that illustrate these principles in action.Apply the lessons to your own ventures: Reflect on how you can foster innovation and build winning teams in your own organization.Quotes:"Creativity is a collaborative process. Innovation comes from teams more often than from the lightbulb moments of lone geniuses." - Walter Isaacson"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." - Alan Kay (as quoted in "The Innovators")Timestamps:(00:00) Intro(04:18) Walter Isaacson(08:21) Overview of the Book(12:28) Tool #1: Ada Lovelace and the Power of Visionary Thinking(18:01) Tool #2: Collaborative Teamwork(23:13) Tool #3: Craftsmanship(29:00) Tool #4: The Entrepreneurial Spirit and Culture of Innovation(35:32) Tool #5: Leadership that Breeds Innovation(42:13) Tool #6: Persistent Innovation(47:19) Tool #7: Public Awareness and Advocacy(53:48) Tool #8: Customer Centricity(58:51) Tool #9: Technicians Collaborating with Business People(01:03:20) Tool #10: Building Collaborative Ecosystems(01:07:55) Key Takeaways(01:14:00) Tl;dr Episode SummarySend us a Text Message.Support the Show.Join the Podcast Newsletter: Link
Hoewel de concurrentie steeds meer marktaandeel aan het winnen is, blijft dit bedrijf voorlopig nog onmisbaar in de chipsector: Intel! In deze aflevering van Doorgelicht richten journalist Nina van den Dungen en analist Jim Tehupuring de schijnwerper op het chipbedrijf uit Californië zodat jij als belegger kan bepalen wat een Intel-aandeel nou écht waard is. Nina vertelt je alles over de geschiedenis van Intel en Jim doet een fundamentele analyse. Het bedrijf Intel is één van de grootste fabrikanten van microprocessoren ter wereld met ongeveer 130 duizend werknemers in 65 landen. Het bedrijf is lange tijd marktleider geweest op het gebied van microprocessoren, maar vandaag de dag nemen concurrenten zoals AMD steeds meer marktaandeel in waardoor de positie van Intel als koploper steeds onzekerder wordt. Het bedrijf werd in 1968 opgericht door Gordon Moore en Robert Noyce. Intel begon met het ontwerpen en de productie van computerchips die veelal te vinden waren in rekenmachines en industriële apparaten. Hoewel de eerste jaren verlieslijdend waren, sloot Intel de jaren 70 af met een winst van bijna 78 miljoen dollar. De jaren 80 waren veelal succesvol voor Intel, vooral dankzij de deal die het bedrijf met computerbouwer IBM sloot waardoor de eerste personal computers (PC's) voorzien werden van Intel-processoren. Halverwege het decennium leed Intel wel één flink verlieslijdend jaar door de steeds sterker wordende concurrentie, dat was in 1986 toen het bedrijf bijna 203 miljoen dollar verloor. In de jaren 90 wist Intel één van de grootste leveranciers van microprocessoren te worden, mede dankzij de succesvolle marketingcampagne ‘Intel Inside'. Het decennium werd afgesloten met een winst van bijna 30 miljard dollar. De jaren 2000 stonden in het teken van tegenslagen voor Intel doordat concurrent AMD met een nieuwe lijn chips een groot marktaandeel wist af te pakken. Intel wist het hoofd boven water te houden door een megadeal met Apple te sluiten. Daardoor werden alle computers van Apple tot 2020 voorzien van een Intel-processor. Rond 2016 begon de groei van Intel flink te stokken toen er productieproblemen ontstonden rondom de tiende chipgeneratie. Door overhaaste beslissingen kwamen de nieuwste chips pas in 2019 uit, terwijl dat in 2016 al had moeten gebeuren. Ook kwam Intel in een groot schandaal terecht toen aan het licht kwam dat Intel-processoren al sinds 1995 serieuze beveiligingslekken hadden. In 2021 kondigde het bestuur van Intel een nieuwe strategie aan om het bedrijf terug te brengen naar een plekje aan de top. Sindsdien investeert Intel vooral in nieuwe fabrieken, in de industrie ‘fabs' genoemd, en probeert het ook op markt voor videokaarten te komen. Daarnaast hoopt Intel dit jaar ook marktaandeel van Nvidia te pakken met een nieuwe AI-chip. De fundamentele analyse Voor Intel bespreken we onder andere de omzet, de winst, het missende dividend(rendement) en de negatieve kasstroom. Ook kijken we verder dan de cijfers, we focussen op de innovatiekracht, het productaanbod, de concurrentiedruk, de naamsbekendheid en nog veel meer. De presentatoren Nina van den Dungen is journalist en presentatrice bij BNR Nieuwsradio. Als echte verhalenverteller vertelt ze je alles over ontstaansgeschiedenis van bedrijven. Jim Tehupuring is analist en vermogensbeheerder bij 1Vermogensbeheer. Met een flink dossier aan kennis en jarenlange ervaring in de financiële wereld, analyseert hij bedrijven in begrijpelijke taal. Over Doorgelicht In Doorgelicht richten Nina van den Dungen en Jim Tehupuring de schijnwerper op de bedrijven achter je favoriete aandelen zodat jij als belegger kan bepalen wat ze nou écht waard zijn. Disclaimer De inhoud van Doorgelicht is geen financieel advies. Beleg altijd op basis van je eigen overwegingen en onderzoek. Redactie en montage Niels Kooloos See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Ron Whittier Interview Introduction Intel Corporation was founded in 1968 by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, who left Fairchild Semiconductor to start their own company. In the early years from 1970 to 1978, Intel went through major inflection points that helped transform it from a startup to an industry leader. Ron Whittier, who joined Intel in 1970 as an engineering manager, played a key role in navigating many of these pivotal moments. This included instilling the pioneering "Intel Culture" driven by Andy Grove, expanding into new product lines like microprocessors, raising funds through Intel's first public offering in 1972, and then rapidly scaling up design and manufacturing capabilities. From 1978 to 2000, Intel experienced explosive growth riding the PC revolution and the emergence of the world-wide web. Ron helped the company successfully navigate through additional inflection points like improving manufacturing processes under Craig Barrett's leadership, the famous decision to exit the DRAM business to focus on microprocessors, developing major marketing campaigns like "Intel Inside", transitioning to being a sole microprocessor supplier, and forming new groups like the Intel Architecture Labs and Intel Capital. Through recognizing and deftly navigating these many inflection points, Ron and Intel's leadership team transformed the company into a global technology powerhouse. We talked about How did Intel balance looking for outside ideas and developing things internally? When you listen to historians talk about the history of Intel, what are they missing or not getting 100% correct? What words do you want to say to the next generation of Intel employees and entrepreneurs out there? Did you ever look at the other companies in Silicon Valley and think that their businesses were being run in ways that you wished to model? And much more…
Railway tycoon Leland Stanford lived in Santa Clara Valley and founded Stanford University in 1891. Another prominent Stanford University figure, Frederick Terman. invested heavily in businesses that would base themselves in the area and employ talented young people. One such business was the original start-up, an electrical company started in a garage by Stanford alumni William Hewlett and David Packard, Hewlett-Packard. The beginning of Silicon Valley as an epicenter of innovation began in 1955 with the arrival of the Shockley Semiconductors Laboratory. Another revolutionary point was reached in 1968 when Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore left Fairchild Semiconductor to form Intel.
How did the co-founders of Intel go from being "traitors" to two of the early pioneers of Silicon Valley? We learn about Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
What I learned from reading Insull: The Rise and Fall of A Billionaire Utility Tycoon by Forrest McDonald. ----Get access to the World's Most Valuable Notebook for Founders by investing in a subscription to Founders Notes----Come and build in-person relationships at the Founders Only conference----(0:01) Insull had been in the electric business as long as there had been an electric business.(4:00) He awoke early, abruptly, completely, bursting with energy; yet he gained momentum as the day wore on, and long into the night. Sam had near-demonic energy.(5:00) Sam's most obvious attribute was a capacity for racing through large quantities of reading material, effortlessly perceiving its important assumptions and generalizations, and thoroughly assimilating its salient details.(7:00) He eagerly embraced platitudes:• Idle hands are the devil's workshop• Time is money• Things are simply "done" or "not done"• One reveres one's family• Only that which is useful is good• Survival of the fittest(8:00) Opportunity handled well leads to more opportunity.(12:00) He developed an ability to concentrate on a single subject and to completely shut out everything else, no matter how pressing.(13:00) A theme from the robber baron era: How do we turn a luxury product into a necessity?(18:00) If you do everything you will win. — Working by Robert Caro. (Founders #305) and The Mind of Napoleon: A Selection of His Written and Spoken Words edited by J. Christopher Herold. (Founders #302)(19:00) Insull reread every one of Edison's European contracts, and he took it upon himself to write weekly letters to Johnson, summarizing the fluctuations in the telephone situation and outlining Edison's shifting interests in connection with it. These letters proved to be the best selling points Johnson could have in recommending Insull to Edison.(20:00) One of his most deep-rooted traits was that he was absolutely unable to imagine the possibility of his own failure; he entirely lacked the sense of caution of those who doubt themselves.(21:00) Caution, like relaxation, was unnatural to him.(21:00) We will make electric lights so cheap that only the rich will be able to burn candles.(27:00) Edison had an almost pathological hostility to any form of system, order, or discipline imposed from without.(33:00) Warren Buffett on leverage:Unquestionably, some people have become very rich through the use of borrowed money. However, that's also been a way to get very poor. When leverage works, it magnifies your gains. Your spouse thinks you're clever, and your neighbors get envious. But leverage is addictive. Once having profited from its wonders, very few people retreat to more conservative practices.And [to repeat] as we all learned in third grade-and some relearned in 2008–any series of positive numbers, however impressive the numbers may be, evaporates when multiplied by a single zero. History tells us that leverage all too often produces zeroes, even when it is employed by very smart people.Leverage, of course, can be lethal to businesses as well. Companies with large debts often assume that these obligations can be refinanced as they mature. That assumption is usually valid. Occasionally, though, either because of company-specific problems or a worldwide shortage of credit, maturities must actually be met by payment. For that, only cash will do the job.— The Essays of Warren Buffett by Warren Buffett and Lawrence Cunningham. (Founders #227)(35:00) Smart men go broke three ways: liquor, ladies and leverage. — Charlie Munger(42:00) To make electricity as cheap as possible we need the largest base of customers. The way to get the largest base of customers is through monopoly.(45:00) He understood the potential of his industry in a way others did not.(45:00) We are only going to do things that other people can not do.(47:00) While money may not buy friends it will keep many a man from becoming an enemy.(50:00) The moment of applause was the moment for action.(1:00:00) You need to tell your customers what goes into making your product. It may be normal to you because it is your everyday thing. It is not normal to them. And if you explain and you educate your customers they will find it fascinating. And as a result it will make the service and the product you provide more valuable in their eyes.(1:00:00) Sam Insull made electric power so abundant and cheap in the United States that people who had never expected to use it, found it as natural and as necessary as breathing.(1:06:00) He took his leverage too high and the structure of the leverage was a problem. — Ted Turner's Autobiography.(Founders #327)----Get access to the World's Most Valuable Notebook for Founders by investing in a subscription to Founders Notes----Come and build in-person relationships at the Founders Only conference----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested, so my poor wallet suffers.” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast
Bonjour à tous,Voici un nouvel épisode de notre série “À deux voix” consacré à l'âge et l'innovation. Faut-il être jeune pour innover ? Nous avons tous en tête cette idée reçue selon laquelle il faut être jeune pour porter un regard différent sur le monde et innover. Beaucoup de gens voient le vieillissement de la population avec inquiétude et se demandent si l'on va pouvoir continuer à innover dans ce contexte de raréfaction de la jeunesse, du fait de la transition démographique en cours.Tant Laetitia et moi travaillons sur le sujet ces jours-ci et nous avons donc pensé que c'était une belle occasion de confronter nos idées. Bonne écoute !Au fil de notre conversation, nous discutons :* De l'âge chronologique, biologique et social ;* Des effets d'âge, de génération et de période historique ;* De l'âge et du contexte de vie ;* Des origines de la Silicon Valley, repaire de jeunes premiers de la classe ;* De Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce et Steve Jobs ;* De ce qu'est l'innovation et de ce qu'elle n'est pas ;* Des innovations d'optimisation, d'amélioration et de rupture ;* De où se fait l'innovation ;* De la non-visibilité d'une partie des innovations ;* De l'industrie automobile allemande ;* Du mythe du jeune entrepreneur…Are older people less innovative? Laetitia@Work #61 (en anglais) Who (And Where) Are Today's Innovators? European Straits #242 (en anglais)Les startups, c'est fini ? (conversation “À deux voix”)
Blog post: https://medium.com/asecuritysite-when-bob-met-alice/noyce-moore-and-grove-a-template-for-spin-out-start-up-success-b67d9795154a Introduction So, is there a formula for a successful start-up/spin-out — and if you followed it, you would be guaranteed success? For this, many people approach me and say, “I want to have a spin-out. What should I do?”. To me, this is a little like saying, “I want to fly, can you give me wings?”. So, let me lay out a few things that I have learned over the past two decades of being involved in spin-out companies. Overall, we have been very lucky in our spin-outs, with three highly successful ones, and where two have been bought out (Zonefox and Symphonic), and the third is expanding fast within digital forensics (Cyacomb). But, as they say, “The Harder I Practice, the Luckier I Get”. We have had failures, but every time our team has licked their wounds and come back stronger. And the one thing, though, I've observed is that the leadership of an innovative company often needs to change as it evolves, and those leading it need to know when they need to move aside and let others take their place. So, I'm going to define the three stages as: Visionary, Strategy and Grit, and where there are very different leaders at each stage. But, fundamentally, the first two stages set up the culture and approach of the company, and which are fundamental to its long-term beliefs and ideals. Overall, few companies in the third stage can turn their ship and travel in a different direction. The approach of IBM, for example, is still one of an engineering approach to their work and one built on rewarding innovation. Forgive me, I'm technical And, so I am a cryptography professor, and not a business one, so please forgive me for not covering the core literature in the areas of business. I am also highly technical, and that is what I love. I would never want to be a cut-throat business person and would never want to be. I love inventing things and seeing ideas grow from seeds. And one thing I know is when my role is complete as part of the innovation process and when to move aside. But, deeply technical people are at the core of creating a successful spin-out, along with people with a vision. And, so, I would like to lay out a basic template of my observations in creating a successful spin-out — and based on the ones we have produced. To me, also, a great technical company should have a core of theoretical work, and where the best work can come from academic collaborations. In academia, there is an attention to detail and theory, and which makes sense of the complex world of invention and discovery. But, the magic comes from practical implements, and where the best collaborations mix practice with theory. So, my basic template for success is to get the right leadership team in place, and get the right leader for the right time. A core part of this is knowing when the leader should move aside and let someone else take over. For this, I'll map it to the success of Intel and its first three employees: Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and Andy Grove. Stage 1: Robert Noyce — the Visionary (1968–1975) If there's a superstar of our digital era, it must be Robert Noyce. Imagine inventing the one thing that now drives virtually everything in our digital age: the integrated circuit. It all started in the late 1950s with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain at Bell Labs and who first invented the transistor. William Shockley advanced the concept with the creation of the bipolar transistor. Bardeen and Brattain were a great research team and has a great balance of theoretical skills with practical ones. Brattain did the theory, and Bardeen did the practical work. All three eventually received a Nobel Prize for their work — with Brattain being one of the few people to ever get two Nobel Prizes. While Bell Labs was a hub of innovation at the time, Shockley wanted to take a good deal of the credit for the invention of the transistor and left Bell Labs to set up his own company in 1955: Shockley Semiconductor. For this, we recruited Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore to work on his ideas. But Shockley was a difficult boss and had an overbearing approach to his management style. This caused eight of Shockley's employees — including Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore — to leave the company and start their own venture with the support of Fairchild Camera and Instrument. It was there, in 1961, that Robert created one of the most significant patents of all time: It outlined a magical way of doping a semiconductor substrate and producing an integrated circuit: This invention differed from Jack Kilby's work at Texas Instruments, as Robert outlined a monolithic circuit while Jack defined a hybrid circuit approach. And, so, Fairchild grew fast as a leader in semiconductors, but as the company grew, Robert increasingly missed the days of true innovation and decided to team up with Gordon Moore to create Integrated Electronics (which would end up just being known as Intel). And, so, Robert was the anchor for the creation of Intel. A true visionary and someone that people trusted and listened to. It was thus not difficult for Andy Rock to find the seed funding for the start-up — as it had Robert's name on it. Those who invested in the company were not investing in the company and its projected product line but in Robert. In Stage 1 we thus have the visionary leader. The person who can see beyond the near future and build a company that could scale towards their vision, and someone who both inspired people to believe and someone who others could trust with the vision. And, so, Robert led Intel from 1968 to 1975 but knew the time that he needed to hand over to someone else. And, that needed to be someone who had a core understanding of the technology required to scale Intel: Gordon Moore. Stage 2: Gordon Moore — the technical and strategic genius (1975–1987) In Stage 2, we move from the visionary leader to the strategic leader, and there was no better person than Gordon Moore (and who created the mighty Moore's Law — and which is still relevant to this day). Gordon had an eye for detail and quality. For Intel to succeed, they needed someone to convert the vision shown by Noyce to something that matched the market. For this, he invested heavily in R&D and made Intel a world leader in the memory market. But, he showed his strategic brilliance by spotting the opportunity to initiate work in microprocessors. As we all know, in 1969, Intel was designing some chips for Busicom and decided to integrate these into a single device, which could be programmed with software. The designer was Ted Hoff, and he produced the first microprocessor: the 4004. And, so, as the memory market became crowded and profits fell, Gordon moved Intel out of it and ramped up the development of the 8-bit and 16-bit microprocessors. The device that sprang out of this development was the Intel 8086, which — luck would have it — was the processor selected for the IBM PC. It was luck and strategy, and Gordon was a core part of this. Most CEOs would have pushed forward in the memory market, but Gordon focused Intel's R&D on new markets. Gordon Moore was thus the second phase leader and the one who could stop opportunities and be in the right place at the right time to exploit them. Without his technical genius, the company would have struggled to understand how to scale R&D into emerging markets. Stage 3: Andy Grove — the detail (1987–1998) And now we need the last piece of the puzzle … Andy Grove. Intel had grown up as a company of idealists and lacked a “Us and Them” approach to management. Noyce, Moore and Grove had led the company, but they were colleagues. Many remember that it was often difficult to find Gordon in the company when they visited him, as he sat in a cubical in the open plan set up and shared the same physical space with others in the company. There were no fancy trimmings for Gordon in his CEO role — he was as much a worker as any other. And both Robert and Gordon had a gentle approach to their management style, but Andy brought an edge that the congenial Moore and Noyce could never give. At eight years old, Andy escaped with his mother from the Nazis and left Hungary at the age of 20 during the Hungarian Revolution. He arrived in the US as a refugee with no money but with a passion for learning. Eventually, he gained his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. And, so, Andy provided the grit and desire to succeed that Intel needed, and, as with Gordon, he had an eye for quality and in making sure that everything that Intel did was at the highest possible technical level. And so it was Andy who had the grit to move Intel out of its core memory business and into microprocessors. He had a knack for taking complex problems and distilling them down into strategies that were easy for those involved to understand. Perhaps it was because he was an engineer first and then had to learn about management and strategic approaches. His strategy was to move Intel out of memory and straight into the PC. The natural choice at the time for the processor in the PC was Motorola, but Grove managed to get the technical support in place for the Intel chip, and that allowed engineers to develop their prototypes. And, what did Grove do about the expertise in memory? He put it to good use in integrating SRAM caches into the processor, which massively speeded up their operation. Andy thus had the grit that Intel required to take it into new markets and win: The most important role of managers is to create an environment where people are passionately dedicated to winning in the marketplace. Fear plays a major role in creating and maintaining such passion. Fear of competition, fear of bankruptcy, fear of being wrong and fear of losing can all be powerful motivators. Conclusions Moore and Noyce drove Intel to become one of the world's most powerful companies. The team had a perfect balance … Noyce inspired everyone he met and built an initial customer base, while Moore built technical excellence and then followed through. It was left to Grove to focus on detail and excellence. William Shockley failed in the market as he couldn't share success with others, while Moore, Noyce and Grove built a culture of collaboration and in taking shared ownership of the company they built. The first stages of a company are thus so important is building its culture into the future. If those involved in those first stages do not act in the right way, then the company may be doomed to have the wrong approaches to its employees and customers. The initial leaders are the ones that people should look up to and be inspired by. This is not often through business practice, but having core scientific and technical expertise in their field. So, get your team in place … a visionary, a technical genius, and a true leader with grit. But, knowing the best leader at any given time and knowing when to hand over to someone else can take the next great step forward. And, go do something wonderful …
Listen to the full episode on your favorite streaming platform: https://bit.ly/available-on-all-platforms
Intel and AMD have a common history, but each company has gone its own way in chip design. Why are Intel chips and AMD chips not compatible? And is there one type of chip that's better than all the rest? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Computing pioneer and Intel co-founder Gordon Moore has died. His name is commonly used in reference to Moore's Law, which stated that processors would be exponentially more complex, but he was much more than this. Moore was a visionary, who guided Intel through the DRAM market in the early years and then lead the transition of the company to lay the foundation for modern microcomputers. He quiet and polite, unlike Robert Noyce and Andy Grove, but everyone trusted Moore's thoughtful and considered decisions. Moore learned from his mistakes, notably a foray into the digital watch market, and was able to lead while allowing others to have their own autonomy. In a way, Moore created Silicon Valley but was entirely unlike what it has become. We could surely use more leaders in the mold of Gordon Moore! Time Stamps: 0:00 - Welcome to the Rundown 0:34 - Toshiba Takeover Talks 3:10 - Biden Outlaws Feds Commercial Spyware 6:03 - MinIO and Weka Divided on Licensing Changes 14:09 - OVHcloud Owes for Data Damages 18:42 - Arm Wants an Arm and a Leg for Chip Licenses 24:52 - Gordon Moore Dies at 94 37:35 - The Weeks Ahead 38:34 - Thanks for Watching Follow our hosts on Social MediaTom Hollingsworth: https://www.twitter.com/NetworkingNerdStephen Foskett: https://www.twitter.com/SFoskett Follow Gestalt ITWebsite: https://www.GestaltIT.com/Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/GestaltITLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/1789 Tags: #Rundown, #GordonMoore, #Spyware, #Pegasus, #Cloud, #ChipLicense, #NFD31, #NFDx, #ArubaAtmosphere, #Toshiba, @MinIO, @WekaIO, @OVHcloud, @OVHcloud_US, @Arm, @Intel
We've talked about the history of microchips, transistors, and other chip makers. Today we're going to talk about Intel in a little more detail. Intel is short for Integrated Electronics. They were founded in 1968 by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore. Noyce was an Iowa kid who went off to MIT to get a PhD in physics in 1953. He went off to join the Shockley Semiconductor Lab to join up with William Shockley who'd developed the transistor as a means of bringing a solid-state alternative to vacuum tubes in computers and amplifiers. Shockley became erratic after he won the Nobel Prize and 8 of the researchers left, now known as the “traitorous eight.” Between them came over 60 companies, including Intel - but first they went on to create a new company called Fairchild Semiconductor where Noyce invented the monolithic integrated circuit in 1959, or a single chip that contains multiple transistors. After 10 years at Fairchild, Noyce joined up with coworker and fellow traitor Gordon Moore. Moore had gotten his PhD in chemistry from Caltech and had made an observation while at Fairchild that the number of transistors, resistors, diodes, or capacitors in an integrated circuit was doubling every year and so coined Moore's Law, that it would continue to to do so. They wanted to make semiconductor memory cheaper and more practical. They needed money to continue their research. Arthur Rock had helped them find a home at Fairchild when they left Shockley and helped them raise $2.5 million in backing in a couple of days. The first day of the company, Andy Grove joined them from Fairchild. He'd fled the Hungarian revolution in the 50s and gotten a PhD in chemical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Then came Leslie Vadász, another Hungarian emigrant. Funding and money coming in from sales allowed them to hire some of the best in the business. People like Ted Hoff , Federico Faggin, and Stan Mazor. That first year they released 64-bit static random-access memory in the 3101 chip, doubling what was on the market as well as the 3301 read-only memory chip, and the 1101. Then DRAM, or dynamic random-access memory in the 1103 in 1970, which became the bestselling chip within the first couple of years. Armed with a lineup of chips and an explosion of companies that wanted to buy the chips, they went public within 2 years of being founded. 1971 saw Dov Frohman develop erasable programmable read-only memory, or EPROM, while working on a different problem. This meant they could reprogram chips using ultraviolet light and electricity. In 1971 they also created the Intel 4004 chip, which was started in 1969 when a calculator manufacturer out of Japan ask them to develop 12 different chips. Instead they made one that could do all of the tasks of the 12, outperforming the ENIAC from 1946 and so the era of the microprocessor was born. And instead of taking up a basement at a university lab, it took up an eight of an inch by a sixth of an inch to hold a whopping 2,300 transistors. The chip didn't contribute a ton to the bottom line of the company, but they'd built the first true microprocessor, which would eventually be what they were known for. Instead they were making DRAM chips. But then came the 8008 in 1972, ushering in an 8-bit CPU. The memory chips were being used by other companies developing their own processors but they knew how and the Computer Terminal Corporation was looking to develop what was a trend for a hot minute, called programmable terminals. And given the doubling of speeds those gave way to microcomputers within just a few years. The Intel 8080 was a 2 MHz chip that became the basis of the Altair 8800, SOL-20, and IMSAI 8080. By then Motorola, Zilog, and MOS Technology were hot on their heals releasing the Z80 and 6802 processors. But Gary Kildall wrote CP/M, one of the first operating systems, initially for the 8080 prior to porting it to other chips. Sales had been good and Intel had been growing. By 1979 they saw the future was in chips and opened a new office in Haifa, Israiel, where they designed the 8088, which clocked in at 4.77 MHz. IBM chose this chip to be used in the original IBM Personal Computer. IBM was going to use an 8-bit chip, but the team at Microsoft talked them into going with the 16-bit 8088 and thus created the foundation of what would become the Wintel or Intel architecture, or x86, which would dominate the personal computer market for the next 40 years. One reason IBM trusted Intel is that they had proven to be innovators. They had effectively invented the integrated circuit, then the microprocessor, then coined Moore's Law, and by 1980 had built a 15,000 person company capable of shipping product in large quantities. They were intentional about culture, looking for openness, distributed decision making, and trading off bureaucracy for figuring out cool stuff. That IBM decision to use that Intel chip is one of the most impactful in the entire history of personal computers. Based on Microsoft DOS and then Windows being able to run on the architecture, nearly every laptop and desktop would run on that original 8088/86 architecture. Based on the standards, Intel and Microsoft would both market that their products ran not only on those IBM PCs but also on any PC using the same architecture and so IBM's hold on the computing world would slowly wither. On the back of all these chips, revenue shot past $1 billion for the first time in 1983. IBM bought 12 percent of the company in 1982 and thus gave them the Big Blue seal of approval, something important event today. And the hits kept on coming with the 286 to 486 chips coming along during the 1980s. Intel brought the 80286 to market and it was used in the IBM PC AT in 1984. This new chip brought new ways to manage addresses, the first that could do memory management, and the first Intel chip where we saw protected mode so we could get virtual memory and multi-tasking. All of this was made possible with over a hundred thousand transistors. At the time the original Mac used a Motorola 68000 but the sales were sluggish while they flourished at IBM and slowly we saw the rise of the companies cloning the IBM architecture, like Compaq. Still using those Intel chips. Jerry Sanders had actually left Fairchild a little before Noyce and Moore to found AMD and ended up cloning the instructions in the 80286, after entering into a technology exchange agreement with Intel. This led to AMD making the chips at volume and selling them on the open market. AMD would go on to fast-follow Intel for decades. The 80386 would go on to simply be known as the Intel 386, with over 275,000 transistors. It was launched in 1985, but we didn't see a lot of companies use them until the early 1990s. The 486 came in 1989. Now we were up to a million transistors as well as a math coprocessor. We were 50 times faster than the 4004 that had come out less than 20 years earlier. I don't want to take anything away from the phenomenal run of research and development at Intel during this time but the chips and cores and amazing developments were on autopilot. The 80s also saw them invest half a billion in reinvigorating their manufacturing plants. With quality manufacturing allowing for a new era of printing chips, the 90s were just as good to Intel. I like to think of this as the Pentium decade with the first Pentium in 1993. 32-bit here we come. Revenues jumped 50 percent that year closing in on $9 billion. Intel had been running an advertising campaign around Intel Inside. This represented a shift from the IBM PC to the Intel. The Pentium Pro came in 1995 and we'd crossed 5 million transistors in each chip. And the brand equity was rising fast. More importantly, so was revenue. 1996 saw revenues pass $20 billion. The personal computer was showing up in homes and on desks across the world and most had Intel Inside - in fact we'd gone from Intel inside to Pentium Inside. 1997 brought us the Pentium II with over 7 million transistors, the Xeon came in 1998 for servers, and 1999 Pentium III. By 2000 they introduced the first gigahertz processor at Intel and they announced the next generation after Pentium: Itanium, finally moving the world to the 64 bit processor. As processor speeds slowed they were able to bring multi-core processors and massive parallelism out of the hallowed halls of research and to the desktop computer in 2005. 2006 saw Intel go from just Windows to the Mac. And we got 45 nanometer logic technology in 2006 using hafnium-based high-k for transistor gates represented a shift from the silicon-gated transistors of the 60s and allowed them to move to hundreds of millions of transistors packed into a single chip. i3, i5, i7, an on. The chips now have over a couple hundred million transistors per core with 8 cores on a chip potentially putting us over 1.7 or 1.8 transistors per chip. Microsoft, IBM, Apple, and so many others went through huge growth and sales jumps then retreated dealing with how to run a company of the size they suddenly became. This led each to invest heavily into ending a lost decade effectively with R&D - like when IBM built the S/360 or Apple developed the iMac and then iPod. Intel's strategy had been research and development. Build amazing products and they sold. Bigger, faster, better. The focus had been on power. But mobile devices were starting to take the market by storm. And the ARM chip was more popular on those because with a reduced set of instructions they could use less power and be a bit more versatile. Intel coined Moore's Law. They know that if they don't find ways to pack more and more transistors into smaller and smaller spaces then someone else will. And while they haven't been huge in the RISC-based System on a Chip space, they do continue to release new products and look for the right product-market fit. Just like they did when they went from more DRAM and SRAM to producing the types of chips that made them into a powerhouse. And on the back of a steadily rising revenue stream that's now over $77 billion they seem poised to be able to whether any storm. Not only on the back of R&D but also some of the best manufacturing in the industry. Chips today are so powerful and small and contain the whole computer from the era of those Pentiums. Just as that 4004 chip contained a whole ENIAC. This gives us a nearly limitless canvas to design software. Machine learning on a SoC expands the reach of what that software can process. Technology is moving so fast in part because of the amazing work done at places like Intel, AMD, and ARM. Maybe that positronic brain that Asimov promised us isn't as far off as it seems. But then, I thought that in the 90s as well so I guess we'll see.
Margaret O'Mara, Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Chair of American history and professor at the University of Washington, leads the conversation on big tech and global order. CASA: Welcome to today's session of the Winter/Spring 2023 CFR Academic Webinar Series. I'm Maria Casa, director of the National Program and Outreach at CFR. Thank you all for joining us. Today's discussion is on the record, and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org/Academic, if you would like to share it with your colleagues or classmates. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We are delighted to have Margaret O'Mara with us to discuss big tech and global order. Dr. O'Mara is the Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Chair of American history and professor at the University of Washington. She writes and teaches about the growth of the high-tech economy, the history of American politics, and the connections between the two. Dr. O'Mara is an Organization of American Historians distinguished lecturer and has received the University of Washington Distinguished Teaching Award for Innovation with Technology. Previously, she served as a fellow with the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Forum on the Future of Liberal Education. From 1993 to 1997, Dr. O'Mara served in the Clinton administration as an economic and social policy aide in the White House and in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. She is the author of several books and an editor of the Politics and Society in Modern America series at Princeton University Press. Welcome, Margaret. Thank you very much for speaking with us today. O'MARA: Thank you so much, Maria, and thank you all for being here today. I'm setting my supercomputer on my wrist timer so I—to time my talk to you, and which is very apropos and it's really—it's great to be here. I have a few slides I wanted to share as I talk through, and I thought that since we had some really interesting meaty present tense readings from Foreign Affairs as background for this conversation as well as the recent review essay that I wrote last year, I thought I would set the scene a little more with a little more history and how we got to now and thinking in broad terms about how the technology industry relates to geopolitics and the global order as this very distinctive set of very powerful companies now. So I will share accordingly, and, Maria, I hope that this is showing up on your screen as it should. So I knew I—today I needed to, of course, talk—open with something in the news, this—the current—the ongoing questions around what has—what was in the sky and what is being shot down in addition to a Chinese spy balloon, which is really kind of getting to a question that's at the center of all of my work. I write at the intersection of economic history and political history and I do that because I'm interested in questions of power. Who has power? What do they value? This is the kind of the question of the U.S.-China—the operative question of the U.S.-China rivalry and the—and concern about China, what are the values, what are the—and Chinese technology and Chinese technology companies, particularly consumer-facing ones. And this is also an operative question about the extraordinary concentration of wealth and power in a few large platform companies that are based on the West Coast of the United States—(laughs)—a couple in my town of Seattle where I am right now talking to you, and others in Silicon Valley. It's very interesting when one does a Google image search to find a publicly available image and puts in Silicon Valley the images that come up are either the title cards of the HBO television comedy, which I was tempted to add, but the—really, the iconic shot of the valley as place is the Apple headquarters—the Spaceship, as it's called in Cupertino—that opened a few years ago in the middle of suburbia. And this is—you know, the questions of concentrated power in the Q&A among the background readings, you know, this was noted by several of the experts consulted about what is the threat of big tech geopolitically and concentrated power, whether that's good, bad, if that's an advantage geopolitically or not. It was something that many of those folks brought up as did the other readings as well. And this question of power—who has power and taking power—has been an animating question of the modern technology industry and there's an irony in this that if you think about the ideological granddaddy of Apple itself is the Whole Earth Catalog, which I—and this is—I quote from this in the opening to my review essay that was part of the background readings and I just thought I would pop this up in full for us to think about. This is Stewart Brand. This is the first issue of the Whole Earth Catalog. The full issue is digitized at the Internet Archive as are so many other wonderful artifacts and primary source materials about this world, and this is right here on the—you know, you turn—open the cover and here is the purpose: “We are as gods and might as well get used to it. So far, remotely done power and glory as via government, big business, formal education, and church has succeeded to the point where gross obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog.” The audience of the Whole Earth Catalog was not a bunch of techies, per se. It was back to the landers, people who were going and founding communes and the catalog was—you know, which was more a piece of art than it was an actual shopping guide, had all sorts of things from books by Buckminster Fuller to camp stoves and to the occasional Hewlett Packard scientific calculator, making this kind of statement that these tools could actually be used for empowerment of the individual because, of course, the world of 1968 is one in which computers and AI are in the hands of the establishment. We see this playing out in multiple scales including Hollywood films like Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which, of course, follows, what, four years earlier Dr. Strangelove, which was also a satiric commentary on concentrated power of the military industrial complex, and computers were, indeed, things that were used by large government agencies, by the Pentagon, by Fortune 50 companies. And so the countercultural computer or personal computer movement is very much about individual power and taking this away from the global order, so to speak. This is the taking—using these tools as a way to connect people at the individual level, put a computer on every desk, connect everyone via computer networks to one another, and that is how the future will be changed. That is how the inequities of the world would be remedied. The notion of ultimate connectivity as a positive good was not something that originated with Facebook but, indeed, has much, much deeper origins and that's worth thinking about as we consider where we are in 2023 and where things are going from there. It's also worth thinking about the way in which global—the global order and particularly national security and government spending has played a role—an instrumental role—in the growth of the technology industry as it is. Take, for example, the original venture-backed startup, Fairchild Semiconductor, which is legendary as really starting the silicon semiconductor industry in the valley. It is the—it puts the silicon in the valley, and the eight co-founders known as the Traitorous Eight because they all quit en masse their previous job at Shockley Semiconductor working for William Shockley, the co-inventor of the transistor, and they went off and did something that one does not—did not do in 1957 very often, which was start your own company. This was something that you did if you were weird and you couldn't work for people. That's what one old timer told me, reflecting back on this moment. But they, indeed, started their own company, found outside financing and in this group contains Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, the two co-founders of Intel, as well as Gene Kleiner, co-founder of Kleiner Perkins, the venture capital firm. This is really the—you know, the original—where it all began, and yes, this is a story of free-market entrepreneurialism but it also is a story of the national security state. This is a—Fairchild is founded at a moment when most of the business in the Santa Clara Valley of California, later known as Silicon Valley, was defense related. This is where the jobs were. This is the business they were doing, by and large. There was not a significant commercial market for their products. A month after they're incorporated—in September '57 is when Fairchild incorporates itself. October 1957 Sputnik goes into orbit. The consequent wave of space spending is really what is the literal rocket ship that gets Silicon Valley's chip business going. The integrated circuits made by Fairchild and other chip makers in the valley go into the Apollo guidance system. NASA is buying these chips at a time that there is not a commercial market for them and that enables these companies to scale up production to create a commodity that can be delivered to the enterprise. And so by the time you get to the 1970s you are not talking about defense contractors in any way. These are companies that are putting their chips in cars and in other—all sorts of one time mechanical equipment is becoming transistorized. And Intel is Intel, still one of the most important and consequential—globally consequential tech companies around at the center of the action in the CHIPS Act of last year, not to mention others. But this longer history and this intertwining with the military industrial complex and with broader geopolitics—because, of course, the space program and the Apollo program was a Cold War effort. It was about beating the Soviets to the moon, not just doing it because we could. But that really kind of dissipates and fades from collective memory in the Valley and beyond with the rise of these entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, young, new-time CEOs that are presenting a very, very different face of business and really being consciously apolitical, presenting themselves as something so far apart from Washington, D.C. And this notion of tech, big or little, being something separate from government and governance is perpetuated by leaders of both parties, not just Ronald Reagan but also by Democrats of a younger generation that in the early 1980s there was a brief moment in which lawmakers like Tim Wirth and Gary Hart were referred to as Atari Democrats because they were so bullish on high-tech industries as the United States' economic future. And the way in which politicians and lawmakers from the 1980s forward talked about tech was very much in the same key as that of people like Steve Jobs, which is that this is a revolutionary—the tools have been taken from the establishment, and this is something that is apart from politics, that transcends the old global order and is a new one. And, in fact, in the speech in May 1988 in Moscow at the end of his presidency Ronald Reagan delivers a—you know, really frames the post-Cold War future as one in which the microchip is the revolutionary instrument of freedom: “Standing here before a mural of your revolution”—and a very large bust of Lenin—“I talk about a very different revolution that is taking place right now. Its effects are peaceful but they will fundamentally alter our world, and it is—the tiny silicon chip is the agent of that, no bigger than a fingerprint.” This is really remarkable, if we sit back and take a deep breath and think about it, and particularly thinking about what happens after that. What happens after that are decades in which, again, leaders of both parties in the United States and world leaders elsewhere are framing the internet and understanding the internet as this tool for freedom and liberation, a tool that will advance democracy. Bill Clinton, towards the end of his presidency, famously kind of said, effectively, that I'm not worried about China because the internet is going to bring—you know, internet is going to make it very hard to have anything but democracy. And this notion of a post-Cold War and beyond the end of history and tech and big tech being central to that that, in fact, aided the rise of big tech. That was a rationale for a light regulatory hand in the United States, allowing these companies to grow and flourish and so big, indeed, they have become. But I want to end on a note just thinking about the—you know, why this history is important, why this connective tissue between past and present actually does matter. It isn't just that, oh, this is nice to know. This is useful. Lawrence Preston Gise was the second—sorry, the first deputy administrator of DARPA in 1958, created in the wake of the Sputnik—post-Sputnik panic, originally called ARPA, now DARPA. He later ran the entire Western Division of the Atomic Energy Commission—Los Alamos, Livermore, et cetera. Longtime government public servant. In his retirement he retired to his farm in west Texas and his young grandson came and lived with him every summer. And his grandson throughout his life has talked about how—what a profound influence his grandfather was on him, showing him how to be a self-sufficient rancher, how to wrangle cattle and to build a barbed wire fence. But the grandson—you know, what the grandson didn't mention that much because it wasn't really relevant to his personal experience was who his grandfather was and what he had done. But when that grandson, Jeff Bezos—a few years ago when there was—when Google employees were writing their open letter to CEO Sundar Pichai saying, we are not in the defense business. We are—we don't like the fact that you are doing work with the Pentagon, and pressuring Google successfully and other companies to get out of doing work with the Pentagon, Bezos reflected, no, I think we're—I think this is our patriotic duty to do work—do this kind of work. And as I listened to him say that on a stage in an interview I thought, ah, that's his grandfather talking because this little boy, of course, was Jeff Bezos, the grandfather of Lawrence Preston Gise, and those—that connective tissue—familial connective tissue as well as corporate and political connective tissue, I think, is very relevant to what we have before us today. So I'll leave it there. Thanks. CASA: Thank you, Margaret, for that very interesting introduction. Let's open up to questions. (Gives queuing instructions.) While our participants are gathering their thoughts would you start us off by providing a few examples of emerging technologies that are affecting higher education? O'MARA: Yeah. Well, we've had a very interesting last three years in which the debate over online learning versus in-person learning very quickly was not necessarily resolved. We did this mass real-time experiment, and I think it made—put into sharp relief the way in which different technologies are shaping the way that higher education institutions are working and this question of who's controlling the—who controls the platforms and how we mediate what learning we do. Even though I now teach in person again almost everything that I do in terms of assignments and communication is through electronic learning management systems. The one we use at UW is Canvas. But, of course, there are these broader questions—ethical questions and substantive questions—about how our AI-enabled technologies including, notably, the star of the moment, ChatGPT, going to change the way in which—it's mostly been around how are students going to cheat more effectively. But I think it also has these bigger questions about how you learn and where knowledge, where the human—where the human is necessary. My take on it is, aside from the kind of feeling pretty confident in my having such arcane prompts for my midterm essay questions and research projects that ChatGPT, I think, would have a very hard time doing a good job with it but although I'm looking forward to many a form letter being filled by that technology in the future, I think that there is a—you know, this has a history, too. The concern about the robot overlords is a very deep one. It extends from—you know, predates the digital age, and the anxiety about whether computers are becoming too powerful. Of course, this question of artificial intelligence or augmented intelligence kind of is the computer augmenting what a human can do rather than replacing what a human can do or pretending to have the nuance and the complexity that a human might be able to convey. I think there's, you know, these bigger questions and I'm sure—I imagine there are going to be some other questions about AI. Really, you know, this is a—I think this is a very good learning moment, quite frankly, to think more—you know, one of the things I teach about a lot is kind of the information that is on the internet and who's created it and how it is architected and how it is findable and how those platforms have been developed over time. And what ChatGPT and other AIs like them are doing is they're scraping this extraordinary bounteous ocean of information and it is as good as the—it's as good as its source, right. So whatever you're able to do with it you have—your source materials are going to determine it. So if there is bias in the sources, if there is inaccuracy in the sources, there is—that will be replicated. It cannot be—you know, I think what it is is it's a really good rough draft, first draft, for then someone with tacit knowledge and understanding to come into, and I like to think of digital tools as ones that reveal where things that only people can do that cannot be replicated, that this—where human knowledge cannot be, where a machine still—even though a machine is informed by things that humans do and now does it at remarkable speed and scale it still is—there is—we are able to identify where humanity makes a difference. And then my one last caution is I do—you know, the one thing you can't do with these new—any of these new technologies is do them well really fast, and the rush to it is a little anxiety inducing. CASA: Thank you. Our first question is from Michael Leong from the—he's a graduate student at the University of Arizona. Michael, would you like to unmute and ask your question? Q: Yeah. Hi, Dr. O'Mara. Hi, Ms. Casa. Sorry for any background noise. I just had a, like, general question about your thoughts on the role big tech plays in geopolitics. Specifically, we've seen with SpaceX and Starlink especially with what's going on in Ukraine and how much support that has been provided to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and potentially holding that over—(inaudible)—forces. So, basically, do we expect to see private companies having more leverage over geopolitical events? And how can we go forward with that? O'MARA: Yeah. That's a really—that's a really great question. And you know, I think that there's—it's interesting because the way—there's always been public-private partnerships in American state building and American geopolitics, and that's something—it's worth kind of just noting that. Like, from the very beginning the United States has used private entities as instruments of policy, as parastatal entities, whether it be through, you know, land grants and transcontinental railroad building in the nineteenth century all the way through to Starlink and Ukraine because, of course, the Pentagon is involved, too—you know, that SpaceX is in a very—is a significant government contractor as ones before it. I think that where there's a really interesting departure from the norm is that what we've seen, particularly in the last, you know, the last forty years but in this sort of post-Cold War moment has been and particularly in the last ten to fifteen years a real push by the Pentagon to go to commercial enterprises for technology and kind of a different model of contracting and, I should say, more broadly, national security agencies. And this is something, you know, a real—including the push under—when Ash Carter was in charge of DOD to really go to Silicon Valley and say, you guys have the best technology and a lot of it is commercial, and we need to update our systems and our software and do this. But I think that the SpaceX partnership is one piece of that. But there has been a real—you know, as the government has, perhaps, not gotten smaller but done less than it used to do and there's been more privatization, there have been—there's been a vacuum left that private companies have stepped into and I think Ian Bremmer's piece was really—made some really important points in this regard that there are things that these platform companies are doing that the state used to do or states used to do and that does give them an inordinate amount of power. You know, and these companies are structurally—often a lot of the control over these companies is in the hands of very, very few, including an inordinate unusual amount of founder power, and Silicon Valley, although there's plenty of political opinionating coming out of there now, which is really a departure from the norm, this kind of partisan statements of such—you know, declarations of the—of recent years are something that really didn't—you didn't see very much before. These are not folks who are—you know, their expertise lies in other domains. So that's where my concern—some concern lies where you have these parastatal actors that are becoming, effectively, states and head of states then and they are not, indeed, speaking for—you know, they're not sovereign powers in the same way and they are speaking for themselves and speaking from their own knowledge base rather than a broader sense of—you know, they're not speaking for the public. That's not their job. CASA: Our next question is from Michael Raisinghani from Texas Woman's University. Michael, if you could unmute. Q: Thank you, Ms. Casa and Dr. O'Mara. A very insightful discussion. Thank you for that. I just thought maybe if you could maybe offer some clarity around the generative AI, whether it's ChatGPT or Wordtune or any of this in terms of the future. If you look, let's say, five, ten years ahead, if that's not too long, what would your thoughts be in this OpenAI playground? O'MARA: Mmm hmm. Well, with the first—with the caveat that the first rule of history is that you can't predict the future—(laughs)—and (it's true ?); we are historians, we like to look backwards rather than forwards—I will then wade into the waters of prediction, or at least what I think the implications are. I mean, one thing about ChatGPT as a product, for example, which has been really—I mean, what a—kudos for a sort of fabulous rollout and marketing and all of a sudden kind of jumping into our public consciousness and being able to release what they did in part because it wasn't a research arm of a very large company where things are more being kept closer because they might be used for that company's purposes. Google, for example, kind of, you know, has very in short order followed on with the reveal of what they have but they kind of were beaten to the punch by OpenAI because OpenAI wasn't—you know, it was a different sort of company, a different sort of enterprise. You know, a lot of it are things that are already out there in the world. If we've, you know, made an airline reservation and had a back and forth with a chatbot, like, that's—that's an example of some of that that's already out in the world. If you're working on a Google doc and doing what absolutely drives me bonkers, which is that Google's kind of completing my sentences for me, but that predictive text, those—you know, many things that we are—that consumers are already interacting with and that enterprises are using are components of this and this is just kind of bringing it together. I think that we should be very cautious about the potential of and the accuracy of and the revolutionary nature of ChatGPT or any of these whether it be Bard or Ernie or, you know, name your perspective chatbot. It is what it is. Again, it's coming from the—it's got the source material it has, it's working with, which is not—you know, this is not human intelligence. This is kind of compilation and doing it very rapidly and remarkably and in a way that presents with, you know, literacy. So I'm not—you know, does very cool stuff. But where the future goes, I mean, clearly, look, these company—the big platform companies have a lot of money and they have a great deal of motivation and need to be there for the next big thing and, you know, if we dial back eighteen months ago there were many in tech who were saying crypto and Web3 was the next big thing and that did not—has not played out as some might have hoped. But there is a real desire for, you know, not being left behind. Again, this is where my worry is for the next five years. If this is driven by market pressures to kind of be the—have the best search, have the best—embed this technology in your products at scale that is going to come with a lot of hazards. It is going to replicate the algorithmic bias, the problems with—extant problems with the internet. I worry when I see Google saying publicly, we are going to move quickly on this and it may not be perfect but we're going to move quickly when Google itself has been grappling with and called out on its kind of looking the other way with some of the real ethical dilemmas and the exclusions and biases that are inherent in some of the incredibly powerful LLMs—the models that they are creating. So that's my concern. This is a genie that is—you know, letting this genie out of the bottle and letting it become a mass consumer product, and if—you know, OpenAI, to its credit, if you go to ChatGPT's website it has a lot of disclaimers first about this is not the full story, effectively, and in the Microsoft rollout of their embedding the technology in Bing last week Microsoft leaders, as well as Sam Altman of OpenAI, were kind of—their talking points were very careful to say this is not everything. But it does present—it's very alluring and I think we're going to see it in a lot more places. Is it going to change everything? I think everyone's waiting for, like, another internet to change everything and I don't know if—I don't know. The jury's out. I don't know. CASA: Thank you. Our next question is a written one. It comes from Denis Fred Simon, clinical professor of global business and technology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He asked, technology developments have brought to the surface the evolving tension between the drive for security with the desire for privacy. The U.S. represents one model while China represents another model. How do societies resolve this tension and is there some preferred equilibrium point? O'MARA: That is a—that's the billion-dollar question and it's—I think it's a relevant one that goes way back. (Laughs.) I mean, there are many moments in the kind of evolution of all of these technologies where the question of who should know what and what's allowable. If we go back to 1994 and the controversy over the Clipper chip, which was NSA wanting to build a backdoor into commercially available software, and that was something that the industry squashed because it would, among other things, have made it very difficult for a company like Microsoft to sell their products in China or other places if you had a—knew that the U.S. national security agencies were going to have a window into it. And, of course, that all comes roaring back in 2013 with Snowden's revelations that, indeed, the NSA was using social media platforms and other commercial platforms—consumer-facing platforms—to gather data on individuals. You know, what is the perfect balance? I mean, this is—I wish I had this nice answer. (Laughs.) I would probably have a really nice second career consulting and advising. But I think there is a—what is clear is that part of what has enabled the American technology industry to do what it has done and to generate companies that have produced, whether you think the transformations on balance are good or bad, transformative products, right. So everything we're using to facilitate this conversation that all of us are having right now is coming from that font. And democratic capitalism was really critical to that and having a free—mostly free flow of information and not having large-scale censorship. I mean, the postscript to the Clipper chip—you know, Clipper chip controversy is two years later the Telecom Act of 1996, which was, on the one hand, designed to ensure the economic growth of what were then very small industries in the internet sector and not—and prevent the telecoms from ruling it all but also were—you know, this was a kind of making a call about, OK, in terms when it comes to the speech on the internet we are going to let the companies regulate that and not be penalized for private—when private companies decide that they want to take someone down, which is really what Section 230 is. It's not about free speech in a constitutional sense. It's about the right of a company to censor or to moderate content. It's often the opposite of the way that it's kind of understood or interpreted or spun in some ways. But it is clear that the institutions of—that encourage free movement of people and capital have been—are pretty critical in fueling innovation writ large or the development and the deployment and scaling of new technologies, particularly digital technologies. But I think you can see that playing out in other things, too. So that has been, I think, a real tension and a real—there's a market dimension to this, not just in terms of an ethical dimension or political dimension that there does need to be some kind of unfettered ability of people to build companies and to grow them in certain ways. But it's a fine balance. I mean, this sort of, like, when does regulation—when does it—when do you need to have the state come in and in what dimension and which state. And this goes back to that core question of like, OK, the powerful entities, what are their values? What are they fighting for? Who are they fighting for? I don't know. I'm not giving you a terribly good answer because I think it's a really central question to which many have grappled for that answer for a very long time. CASA: Thank you. Our next question comes from Ahmuan Williams, a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma. Ahmuan? Q: Thank you. Hi. I'm wondering about ChatGPT, about the regulation side of that. It seems like it's Microsoft that has kind of invested itself into ChatGPT. Microsoft had before gotten the Pentagon contract just a few years back. So it's kind of a two-part question. So, first of all, how does that—what does that say about government's interest in artificial intelligence and what can be done? I know the Council of Foreign Relations also reported that the Council of Europe is actually planning an AI convention to figure out how, you know, a framework of some type of AI convention in terms of treaties will work out. But what should we be worried about when it comes to government and the use of AI in political advertisements and campaigns, about, basically, them flooding opinions with, you know, one candidate's ideas and, therefore, them being able to win because they're manipulating our opinions? So what would you say would be kind of a regulation scheme that might come out of these type—new flourishing AI devices? O'MARA: Mmm hmm. Mmm hmm. That's a good question. I think there's sort of different layers to it. I mean, I see that, you know, the Pentagon contract—the JEDI contract—being awarded to Microsoft, much to Amazon's distress—(laughs)—and litigious distress, is a kind of a separate stream from its decision to invest 10 billion (dollars) in OpenAI. I think that's a commercial decision. I think that's a recognition that Microsoft research was not producing the—you know, Microsoft didn't have something in house that was comparable. Microsoft saw an opportunity to at last do a—you know, knock Google off of its dominant pedestal in search and make Bing the kind of long—kind of a punch line—no longer a punch line but actually something that was a product that people would actively seek out and not just use because it was preinstalled on their Microsoft devices. That is—so I see that as a market decision kind of separate from. The bigger AI question, the question of AI frameworks, yes, and this, again, has a longer history and, you know, I kind of liken AI to the Pacific Ocean. It's an enormous category that contains multitudes. Like, it's—you know, we can—oftentimes when we talk about AI or the AI that we see and we experience, it's machine learning. And part of why we have such extraordinary advances in machine learning in the last decade has—because of the harvesting of individual data on these platforms that we as individuals use, whether it be Google or Meta or others, that that has just put so much out there that now these companies can create something that—you know, that the state of the art has accelerated vastly. Government often is playing catch up, not just in tech but just in business regulation, generally. The other—you know, another example of this in the United States cases with the—in the late nineteenth century, early twentieth century, with what were then new high-tech tech-driven industries of railroads and oil and steel that grew to enormous size and then government regulators played catch up and created the institutions that to this day are the regulators like the FTC created in 1913. Like, you know, that's—of that vintage. So, I think that it depends on—when it comes to—the question about electoral politics, which I think is less about government entities—this is about entities, people and organizations that want to be in charge of government or governments—that is, you know, AI—new technologies of all kinds that incorporate ever more sophisticated kind of, essentially, disinformation, that—information that presents as real and it is not. The increased volume of that and the scale of that and the sophistication of that and the undetectability of it does create a real challenge to free and fair elections and also to preventing, in the American context, international and foreign intervention in and manipulation of elections but true in every context. That is, you know, getting good information before voters and allowing bad actors to exploit existing prejudices or misassumptions. That is an existing problem that probably will be accelerated by it. I think there's—there's a strong case to be made, at least in the U.S. context, for much stronger regulation of campaign advertising that extends to the internet in a much more stricter form. In that domain there's—I think we have pretty good evidence that that has not been—you know, having that back end has made the existing restrictions on other types of campaign speech and other media kind of made them moot because you can just go on a social platform and do other things. So there's—you know, this is—I think the other thing that compromises this is the rapidly changing nature of the technology and the digital—and the global reach of these digital technologies that extends any other product made—you know, any other kind of product. It just is borderless that—in a kind of overwhelming way. That doesn't mean government should give up. But I think there's a sort of supranational level of frameworks, and then there are all sorts of subnational kind of domain-specific frameworks that could occur to do something as a countervailing force or at least slow the role of developers and companies in moving forward in these products. CASA: Thank you. Our next question is a written one. It comes from Prashant Hosur, assistant professor of humanities and social sciences at Clarkson University. He asks, how do you—or she. I'm sorry. I'm not sure. How do you think big tech is likely to affect conventional wisdom around issues of great power rivalry and power transitions? O'MARA: Hmm. I don't—well, I think there are a—these are always—these definitions are always being redefined and who the great powers are and what gives them power is always being reshuffled and—but, of course, markets and economic resources and wealth and—are implicated in this for millennia. I think that tech companies do have this—American tech companies and the tech platforms, which I should preface this by saying, you know, none of the companies we're talking about now are going to rule forever. Maybe that just goes without—it's worth just note, you know, this is—we will have the rise and fall. Every firm will be a dinosaur. Detroit was the most innovative city in the world a hundred and ten years ago. There's still a lot of innovation and great stuff coming out of Detroit, but if you—if I queried anyone here and said, what's the capital of innovation I don't know if you would say Detroit. But back in the heyday of the American auto industry it was, and I think it's a good reminder. We aren't always going to be talking about this place in northern California and north Seattle in this way. But what we have right now are these companies that their products, unlike the products of Henry Ford or General Motors, are ones that are—go across borders with—you know, the same product goes across borders seamlessly and effortlessly, unlike an automobile where a—to sell in a certain country you have to meet that country's fuel standards and, you know, safety standards, et cetera, et cetera. You have a different model for a different market. Instead, here, you know, a Facebook goes where it goes, Google goes where it goes, YouTube goes where it goes, and that has been kind of extraordinary in terms of internationalizing politics, political trends. I think what we've seen globally is very—you know, the role of the internet in that has been extraordinary, both for good and for ill, in the last fifteen years. And then the kind of—the immense—the great deal of power that they have in the many different domains and, again, Ian Bremmer also observed this kind of the—all the different things they do and that is something that is different from twenty-five years ago where you now have companies that are based on the West Coast of the United States with products designed by a small group of people from a kind of narrow, homogenous band of experience who are doing things like transforming taxis and hotels and, I mean, you name it, kind of going everywhere in a way that in the day of the—you know, the first Macintosh, which was like this cool thing on your desk, that was—yes, it was a transformative product. It was a big deal and Silicon Valley was—became a household word and a phrase in the 1980s and the dot.com era, too. That was—you know, everyone's getting online with their AOL discs they got in the mail. But what's happened in the twenty-first century is at a scale and—a global scale and an influence across many different domains, and politics, this very deliberate kind of we are a platform for politics that has really reshaped the global order in ways that are quite profound. This is not to say that everything has to do with big tech is at the root of everything. But let's put it in context and let's, you know—and also recognize that these are not companies that were designed to do this stuff. They've been wildly successful what they set out to do and they have a high-growth tech-driven model that is designed to move fast and, yes, indeed, it breaks things and that has—you know, that has been—they are driven by quarterly earnings. They are driven by other things, as they should be. They are for-profit companies, many of them publicly traded. But the—but because, I think, in part they have been presenting themselves as, you know, we're change the world, we're not evil, we're something different, we're a kinder, gentler capitalism, there has been so much hope hung on them as the answer for a lot of things, and that is not—kind of giving states and state power something of the past to get its act together that instead states need to step up. CASA: Our next question is from Alex Grigor. He's a PhD candidate from University of Cambridge. Alex? Q: Hello. Yes. Thank you. Can you hear me? O'MARA: Yes. CASA: Yes. Q: Yeah. Hi. Thank you, Ms. O'Mara. Very insightful and, in fact, a lot of these questions are very good as well. So they've touched upon a lot of what I was going to ask and so I'll narrow it down slightly. My research is looking at cyber warfare and sort of international conflict particularly between the U.S. and China but beyond, and I was wondering—you started with the sort of military industrial complex and industry sort of breaking away from that. Do you see attempts, perhaps, because of China and the—that the technology industry and the military are so closely entwined that there's an attempt by the U.S. and, indeed, other countries. You see increase in defense spending in Japan and Germany. But it seems to be specifically focused, according to my research, on the technologies that are coming out of that, looking to reengage that sort of relationship. They might get that a little bit by regulation. Perhaps the current downsizing of technology companies is an opportunity for governments to finally be able to recruit some good computer scientists that they haven't been able to—(laughs)—(inaudible). Perhaps it's ASML and semiconductor sort of things. Do you see that as part of the tension a conscious attempt at moving towards reintegrating a lot of these technologies back into government? O'MARA: Yeah. I think we're at a really interesting moment. I mean, one thing that's—you know, that's important to note about the U.S. defense industry is it never went away from the tech sector. It just kind of went underground. Lockheed, the major defense contractor, now Lockheed Martin, was the biggest numerical employer in the valley through the end of the Cold War through the end of the 1980s. So well into the commercial PC era and—but very—you know, kind of most of what was going on there was top secret stuff. So no one was on the cover of Forbes magazine trumpeting what they've done. And there has been—but there has been a real renewed push, particularly with the kind of—to get made in Silicon Valley or, you know, made in the commercial sector software being deployed for military use and national security use and, of course, this is very—completely bound up in the questions of cyber warfare and these existing commercial networks, and commercial platforms and products are ones that are being used and deployed by state actors and nonstate actors as tools for cyber terrorism and cyber warfare. So, yes, I think it's just going to get tighter and closer and the great—you know, the stark reality of American politics, particularly in the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries, is the one place that the U.S. is willing to spend lots of money in the discretionary budget is on defense and the one place where kind of it creates a rationale for this unfettered—largely, unfettered spending or spending with kind of a willingness to spend a lot of money on things that don't have an immediately measurable or commercializable outcome is in national security writ large. That's why the U.S. spent so much money on the space program and created this incredible opportunity for these young companies making chips that only—making this device that only—only they were making the things that the space program needed, and this willingness to fail and the willingness to waste money, quite frankly. And so now we're entering into this sort of fresh—this interesting—you know, the geopolitical competition with China between the U.S. has this two dimensions in a way and the very—my kind of blunt way of thinking about it it's kind of like the Soviet Union and Japan all wrapped up in one, Japan meaning the competition in the 1980s with Japan, which stimulated a great deal of energy among—led by Silicon Valley chip makers for the U.S. to do something to help them compete and one of those outcomes was SEMATECH, the consortium to develop advanced semiconductor technology, whose funding—it was important but its funding was a fraction of the wave of money that just was authorized through last year's legislation, the CHIPS Act as well as Inflation Reduction Act and others. So I'm seeing, you know, this kind of turn to hardware and military hardware and that a lot of the commercial—the government subsidized or incentivized commercial development of green technology and advanced semiconductor, particularly in military but other semiconductor technology and bringing semiconductor manufacturing home to the United States, that is—even those dimensions that are nonmilitary, that are civilian, it's kind of like the Apollo program. That was a civilian program but it was done for these broader geopolitical goals to advance the economic strength and, hence, the broader geopolitical strength of the United States against a competitor that was seen as quite dangerous. So that's my way of saying you're right, that this is where this is all going and so I think that's why this sort of having a healthy sense of this long-term relationship is healthy. It's healthy for the private sector to recognize the government's always been there. So it isn't though you had some innovative secret that the government is going to take away by being involved. And to also think about what are the broader goals that—you know, who is benefiting from them and what is the purpose and recognize often that, you know, many of the advanced technologies we have in the United States are thanks to U.S. military funding for R&D back in the day. CASA: Our next question is written. It's from Damian Odunze, who is an assistant professor at Delta State University. Regarding cybersecurity, do you think tech companies should take greater responsibility since they develop the hardware and software packages? Can the government mandate them, for instance, to have inbuilt security systems? O'MARA: Hmm. Yeah. I think—look, with great power comes great responsibility is a useful reminder for the people at the top of these companies that for—that are so remarkably powerful at the moment and because their platforms are so ubiquitous. There are—you see, for example, Microsoft has really—is a—I think what they've done in terms of partnering with the White House and its occupants and being—kind of acting as a NSA first alert system of sorts and kind of being open about that I think that's been good for them from a public relations perspective, and also—but I think it also reflects this acknowledgement of that responsibility and that it also is bad for their business if these systems are exploited. Yeah, I think that, again, regulation is something that—you know, it's like saying Voldemort in Silicon Valley. Like, some people are, like, oh, regulation, you know. But there's really—there can be a really generative and important role that regulation can play, and the current industry has grown up in such a lightly-regulated fashion you just kind of get used to having all that freedom, and when it comes to cybersecurity and to these issues of national security importance and sort of global importance and importance to the users of the products and the companies that make them there's, I think, a mutual interest in having some sort of rules of the road and that—and I think any company that's operating at a certain scale is—understands that it's in their market interest to be—you know, not to be a renegade, that they are working with. But I think having—you know, there can be a willingness to work with but they're—having a knowledge and an understanding and a respect for your government partners, your state partners, whether they be U.S. or non-U.S. or supranational is really critically important and sometimes tech folks are a little too, like, oh, politics, they don't know what they're doing, you know. We know better. And I think there needs to be a little more mutual exchange of information and some more—yes, some more technical people being able to be successfully recruited into government would probably be a help, too, so there's—on both sides of the table you have technically savvy people who really understand the inner workings of how this stuff is made and don't have simplistic answers of like, oh, we'll just take all the China-made technology out of it. You're, like, well, there's—like, it's kind of deep in the system. You know, so having technologists in the conversation at all points is important. CASA: Thank you. I think we have time for one more question. We'll take that from Louis Esparza, assistant professor at California State University in Los Angeles. Q: Hi. Thank you for your very interesting talk. So I'm coming at this from the social movements literature and I'm coming into this conversation because I'm interested in the censorship and influence of big tech that you seem to be, you know, more literate in. So my question is do you think that this—the recent trends with big tech and collaboration with federal agencies is a rupture with the origin story of the 1960s that you talked about in your talk or do you think it's a continuity of it? O'MARA: Yeah. That's a great way to put it. The answer is, is it both? Well, it's something of a rupture. I mean, look, this—you know, you have this—you have an industry that grows up as intensely—you know, that those that are writing and reading the Whole Earth Catalog in 1968 the military industrial complex is all around them. It is paying for their education sort of effectively or paying for the facilities where they're going to college at Berkeley or Stanford or name your research university—University of Washington. It is the available jobs to them. It is paying for the computers that they learn to code on and that they're doing their work on. It is everywhere and it is—and when you are kind of rebelling against that establishment, when you see that establishment is waging war in Vietnam as being a power—not a power for good but a power for evil or for a malevolent—a government you don't trust whose power, whose motivations you don't trust, then you—you know, you want to really push back against that and that is very much what the personal computer movement that then becomes an industry is. That's why all those people who were sitting around in the 1970s in Xerox Palo Alto Research Center—Xerox Park—just spitballing ideas, they just did not want to have anything to do with military technology. So that's still there, and then that—and that ethos also suffused other actors in, you know, American government and culture in the 1980s forward, the sort of anti-government sentiment, and the concerns about concentrated power continue to animate all of this. And the great irony is that has enabled the growth of these private companies to the power of states. (Laughs.) So it's kind of both of those things are happening and I think, in some ways, wanting to completely revolutionize the whole system was something that was not quite possible to do, although many—it is extraordinary how much it has done. CASA: Margaret, thank you very much for this fascinating discussion and to all of you for your questions and comments. I hope you will follow Margaret on Twitter at @margaretomara. Our next Academic Webinar will take place on Wednesday, March 1, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Chris Li, director of research of the Asia Pacific Initiative and fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, will lead a conversation on U.S. strategy in East Asia. In the meantime, I encourage you to learn about CFR's paid internships for students and fellowships for professors at CFR.org/Careers. Follow at @CFR_Academic on Twitter and visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues. Thank you again for joining us today. We look forward to you tuning in for our webinar on March 1. Bye. (END)
Today I'm talking to Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of Intel. I've been excited to have this conversation for a very long time – ever since Pat took over as CEO a little over a year and a half ago. After all. Intel is a very important company with a huge series of challenges in front of it. It's still the largest chip manufacturer by revenue, and makes more chips than any other company in the United States. In fact there are basically only three major chip manufacturers: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC, which is in Taiwan, Samsung, based in South Korea. And Intel, here in the United States. The Intel Pat took over was struggling, and was losing ground to in a variety of markets. But in the past year and a half, Pat's restructured the company, turned over almost all of its leadership positions, opened a new line of business that would compete with TSMC and make chips for other companies including Intel's competitors, and generally tried to reset Intel's famous engineering culture around engineering. Glossary: IFS - Intel Foundry Service. Raptor Lake - codename for intel's Gen 13 processors that were just the day before we had our conversation. Sapphire Rapids - the codename for Intel's 4th generation Xeon server processors. 20A and 18A - 20A is a rebranding of what was intel's 5nm process scheduled to debut in 2024 and 18A is a rebranding of Intels 5nm+ node due out in 2025. Packaging - integrated circuit packaging is the last step of semiconductor fabrication. It's where a block of semiconductor material is put into a case. The case, is known as a "package" and that is what allows you put a circuit on a board. Wafers - When a processor is made they make processors you make hundreds of them at once on a giant wafer. EUV - is Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography. It's the most advanced way to make chips. ASML - Is the company that makes the machines that lets you make chips. They are the only company that makes EUV machines. RibbonFET - A new transistor technology that Intel developed. ISV - Independent Software Vendors. PDK - Process Design Kit is a set of files that have data and algorithms that explain the manufacturing parameters for a given silicon process. EDA tools - stands for Electronic Design Automation tools. Basically software tools that are used to design and validate the semiconductor manufacturing process. Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore - the founders of Intel. Andy Grove - employee #3 who went on to become one of their most successful CEOs. Links: Moore's Law Intel is replacing its CEO in February Intel has to be better than ‘lifestyle company' Apple at making CPUs, says new CEO Apple is switching Macs to its own processors starting later this year Apple MacBook Air with M1 review: new chip, no problem What we know about Intel's $20 billion bet on Ohio Intel is building a new €17 billion semiconductor manufacturing hub in Germany Intel delays ceremony for Ohio factory over lack of government funding Intel needs 7,000 workers to build its $20 billion chip plant in Ohio Biden signs $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act President Joe Biden speaks after groundbreaking for Intel's $20 billion semiconductor plant Intel's top Arc A770 GPU is priced at $329, available October 12th Intel's 13th Gen processors arrive October 20th with $589 flagship Core i9-13900K Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23149693 Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
In the third episode of Everything PC, we begin our adventure into the world of Intel, the company that in many respects started it all back in 1968. In this episode, the first of a two-parter, Everything PC hosts Duncan McLeod and Gerhard Pretorius look at the storied history of Intel, from its founding by chemist Gordon Moore and physicist Robert Noyce, to its chip designs that helped create and their transform the personal computer industry. In many respects, Intel is the flip side of the AMD story, which we covered in episodes 1 and 2 of Everything PC -- and we do recommend starting with those if you are new to the show (welcome). In this episode, we unpack Intel's early history and its phenomenal rise in the 1980s and 1990s, and how it later lost its mojo amid management upheavals and other self-inflicted wounds. Part 2 of the Intel story, in which we look at the company's future prospects under the leadership of Pat Gelsinger, will be published next week.
In the third episode of Everything PC, we begin our adventure into the world of Intel, the company that in many respects started it all back in 1968. In this episode, the first of a two-parter, Everything PC hosts Duncan McLeod and Gerhard Pretorius look at the storied history of Intel, from its founding by chemist Gordon Moore and physicist Robert Noyce, to its chip designs that helped create and their transform the personal computer industry. In many respects, Intel is the flip side of the AMD story, which we covered in episodes 1 and 2 of Everything PC -- and we do recommend starting with those if you are new to the show (welcome). In this episode, we unpack Intel's early history and its phenomenal rise in the 1980s and 1990s, and how it later lost its mojo amid management upheavals and other self-inflicted wounds. Part 2 of the Intel story, in which we look at the company's future prospects under the leadership of Pat Gelsinger, will be published next week. TechCentral
In the third episode of Everything PC, we begin our adventure into the world of Intel, the company that in many respects started it all back in 1968. In this episode, the first of a two-parter, Everything PC hosts Duncan McLeod and Gerhard Pretorius look at the storied history of Intel, from its founding by chemist Gordon Moore and physicist Robert Noyce, to its chip designs that helped create and their transform the personal computer industry. In many respects, Intel is the flip side of the AMD story, which we covered in episodes 1 and 2 of Everything PC - and we do recommend starting with those if you are new to the show (welcome). In this episode, we unpack Intel's early history and its phenomenal rise in the 1980s and 1990s, and how it later lost its mojo amid management upheavals and other self-inflicted wounds. Part 2 of the Intel story, in which we look at the company's future prospects under the leadership of Pat Gelsinger, will be published next week.
In the third episode of Everything PC, we begin our adventure into the world of Intel, the company that in many respects started it all back in 1968. In this episode, the first of a two-parter, Everything PC hosts Duncan McLeod and Gerhard Pretorius look at the storied history of Intel, from its founding by chemist Gordon Moore and physicist Robert Noyce, to its chip designs that helped create and their transform the personal computer industry. In many respects, Intel is the flip side of the AMD story, which we covered in episodes 1 and 2 of Everything PC - and we do recommend starting with those if you are new to the show (welcome). In this episode, we unpack Intel's early history and its phenomenal rise in the 1980s and 1990s, and how it later lost its mojo amid management upheavals and other self-inflicted wounds. Part 2 of the Intel story, in which we look at the company's future prospects under the leadership of Pat Gelsinger, will be published next week.
Intro.(1:40) - Start of interview.(2:17) - Margaret's "origin story". She grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas. She graduated from college (history major) the year that Bill Clinton ran for President. She took a job in the Bill/Gore '92 campaign. That led to her work in the Clinton White House. It shaped her understanding of how politics and power works. She later went to graduate school to study presidential politics. Her path to studying technology came from President Dwight Eisenhower (involving the domestic economic effects of the cold war). She later worked in VP Gore's office, but not on the technology policy side, rather in empowerment zones, community and regional economic development. "It's very strange to have lived through the history that you're writing about." "The politics of the 1990s is critically important in understanding how we get to the now of the business landscape, globally and in the tech sector in particular."(8:54) - On why she decided to write her book “The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America.” "This is the book I wish existed in 1999 when I was in graduate school to explain [Silicon Valley], [it's an] explanatory handbook."(12:53) - On the role of the government in supporting the development of Silicon Valley, the "military-industrial-complex", the collective vs the individual, reality v. myth. "[Silicon Valley] is a truly distinctive American story." "What the U.S. has done, particularly since the 1940s when the technology flywheel began, is to enlarge the government in a stealthy way." "The government helped to build the computer, hardware and software industries but giving space for entrepreneurs to be entrepreneurial." "The government threw a lot of money in Silicon Valley's direction, and then got out of the way." "Government contracts were a huge and critical piece of the book of business of technology companies [in the early days], that's the launchpad that threw them into the stratosphere."(18:59) - On the origin story of the "Traitorous Eight", Fairchild Semiconductor, the birth of the semiconductor industry, "Defection Capital" (term coined by Tom Wolfe), Arthur Rock, and venture capital.(28:01) - On Silicon Valley's rise vis-a-vis other regions such as Massachusetts, ("geography was destiny" as told by Anna Lee Saxenian, in her book Regional Advantage, highlighting the organizational/management contrasts between the two regions). "The Bay Area is full of transplants, from the U.S. and around the world." "Immigration policy is part of the secret of Silicon Valley." The roles of Lockheed Martin and HP in Silicon Valley ("HP did so much to set the tone of Silicon Valley's business culture, in a very deliberate contrast to places like Boston." "Management by walking around, or by wandering around" - rather than sitting around in an office.") "The idea of meritocracy in Silicon Valley comes from that era - it was the place where smart boys who didn't have family wealth or connections came, and they were able to build amazing careers, and in some cases significant fortunes." "Now that openness is not quite as easy."(33:56) - Margaret's take on the use of dual-class share structures by Silicon Valley founders on an historical perspective. "The return of Steve Jobs to Apple [after being fired] cemented the founder narrative, the belief that the "brilliant guys" get displaced [by investors or others] result in companies loosing their innovation." "When hardware got displaced by software, engineering became the product and having extraordinary talent at the top became the priority and a market advantage." The political environment and abundant capital has also played a critical role in setting these terms.(44:05) - Her article "The Secret of Building the Next Silicon Valley" (Wired, Jan 2022). "The next generation of high-tech places will come from investments in people, as well as in technology." "Silicon Valley is no longer merely a place in northern California, it is a global network, a business sensibility, a cultural shorthand, a political hack." "One commonality is that it is not about technology, it's about the people seizing opportunities [such as Fred Terman]." "It's also about an investment in higher education. In the case of UC Berkeley, Californian students were paying $50 per semester in the 60s to study elite level engineering (it was accessible and cheap). It was an escalator of upper mobility [although at the time it was mostly white men.]" "Steve Jobs went to a public school in Silicon Valley in the late 60s that had a computer lab [Steve Jobs' dad did not graduate high school]."(49:00) - On the rise of U.S. regional hubs ("the geography of tech"), and the geopolitical tensions with China.(55:37) - Margaret's favorite books:In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, by Michael B. Katz (1986)The Power Broker, by Robert Caro (1974)(57:44) - Who were your mentors, and what did you learn from them?Michael B. Katz (her graduate advisor).Bosses in the Clinton Administration.(59:22) - Quotes that she thinks of often, or lives her life by: "The days are long, the years are short."(59:33) - An unusual habit or an absurd thing that she loves: watching TikToks with her daughters.(1:00:36) - The living person she most admires? Her students at UW. Having their college careers upended by the pandemic is no treat. She admires their resiliency. She's bullish on GenZ.Margaret O'Mara is the Howard & Frances Keller Endowed Professor of History at the University of Washington. She writes and teaches about the growth of the high-tech economy, the history of U.S. politics, and the connections between the two.You can follow Margaret at the following links:Twitter @margaretomaraLinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/margaretomara/Instagram @margaretomaraWebsite https://www.margaretomara.com__ You can follow Evan on social media at:Twitter @evanepsteinLinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/epsteinevan/ Substack https://evanepstein.substack.com/Music/Soundtrack (found via Free Music Archive): Seeing The Future by Dexter Britain is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License
Transforming a business is never easy, but when is the right time to do it? Learn a valuable question to ask yourself when that time comes from Andy Grove. Dave Young: Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not so secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector and storyteller. I'm Stephen's sidekick and business partner, Dave Young. Before we get into today's episode, a word from our sponsor, which is, well it's us, but we're highlighting ads we've written and produced for our clients. So here's one of those. [Peak PPT Ad] Dave Young: Intel Inside. Intel. That's the music. [Intel Chime Plays] Stephen Semple: That is it. That's the song. Dun dun dun dun. Dun dun dun dun. It's officially called Leap Ahead. Dave Young: We've been hearing that for a while haven't we? Stephen Semple: Yeah. I'm not sure how long they've been running that one for, but yeah, it's been a while. Remember there was even a while there where they had the Blue Man Group do a little bit of [crosstalk 00:01:24] Dave Young: Oh yeah. Yeah. Stephen Semple: So if everybody's probably guessed, today, we're talking about... Dave Young: Intel. Stephen Semple: Intel. Intel's got a neat company, because today, it's one of the dominant companies in the technology space. Dave Young: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Stephen Semple: And you know, they make the chips that run, frankly, most of the computers in the world, but they've come a long way baby from their first year in business. So they started in 1968. Guess how much money they made in 1968? How much money did they make in their first year? They do $21 billion today. Dave Young: 21 billion. Stephen Semple: 21 billion, B $21 billion. How much do you think they did in 1968 in their first year? Dave Young: Did they actually make money? Stephen Semple: They lost money, but what do you think the revenues were? Dave Young: 1968, couple million. Stephen Semple: $2,678. Dave Young: Wow. I wonder if they had a full time accountant to count that. Stephen Semple: Yeah. And when I say 21 billion, that was their profitability. They do like 80 billion in sales and they've got a 100,000 employees today. So they've come a long ways baby, from that 2,678 bucks in their first year. So Intel was officially founded by Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce. And Moore is probably familiar to a lot of people because Moore is so influential, he's got a law named after him. Dave Young: Yeah, he's... I was going to say he's the Moore's law guy. Stephen Semple: He's the Moore's law. And that law is the thing that drove development and thinking and technology space for decades. And Moore's law states, the number of transistors on a chip will double every 18 months and that's pretty much what happened. So you're a big deal when you got a law named after you that people outside the technology industry know. Dave Young: I think it's still applicable. I mean they're finding weird new ways of just keep doing it. Stephen Semple: Yes, but it's still very much happening and very much drives the thinking and the design. But here's the thing, our story today is going to be actually be about Andy Grove. Dave Young: Okay. Stephen Semple: So Andy Grove, while he's not one of the founders, he was the first employee. He had joined on incorporation day. The day they incorporated, Andy Grove joined. And he's been described as the guy who drove growth in Silicon Valley. So again, he's a very, very big deal and right from the start, he was the CEO of Intel. And Grove was born to a middle class Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary. And when he was eight years old, the Nazis occupied Hungary. Dave Young: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Stephen Semple: And he and his mom were deported to a concentratio...
In this episode of Intel on AI host Amir Khosrowshahi, assisted by Dmitri Nikonov, talks with Ian Young about Intel's long-term research to develop more energy-efficient computing based on exploratory materials and devices as well as non-traditional architectures. Ian is Senior Fellow at Intel and the Director of the Exploratory Integrated Circuits in the Components Research. Ian was one of the key players in the advancement of dynamic and static random-access memory (DRAM, SRAM), and the integration of the bipolar junction transistor and complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) gate into a single integrated circuit (BiCMOS). He developed the original Phase Locked Loop (PLL) based clocking circuit in a microprocessor while working at Intel, contributing to massive improvements in computing power. Dimitri is a Principal Engineer in the Components Research at Intel. He works in the discovery and simulation of nanoscale logic devices and manages joint research projects with multiple universities. Both Ian and Dmitri have authored dozens of research papers, many together, in the areas of quantum nanoelectronics, spintronics, and non-Boolean architectures. In the podcast episode, the three talk about moving beyond CMOS architecture, which is limited by current density and heat. By exploring new materials, the hope is to make significant improvements in energy efficiency that could greatly expand the performance of deep neural networks and other types of computing. The three discuss the possible applications of ferroelectric materials, quantum tunneling, spintronics, non-volatile memory and computing, and silicon photonics. Ian talks about some of the current material challenges he and others are trying to solve, such as meeting operational performance targets and creating pristine interfaces, which mimic some of the same hurdles Intel executives Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, and Andrew Grove faced in the past. He describes why he believes low-voltage, magneto-electric spin orbit (MESO) devices with quantum multiferroics (materials with coupled magnetic and ferroelectric order) have the most potential for improvement and wide-spread industry adoption. Academic research discussed in the podcast episode: A PLL clock generator with 5 to 110 MHz of lock range for microprocessors Clock generation and distribution for the first IA-64 microprocessor CMOS scaling trends and beyond Overview of beyond-CMOS devices and a uniform methodology for their benchmarking Benchmarking of beyond-CMOS exploratory devices for logic integrated circuits Tunnel field-effect transistors: Prospects and challenges Scalable energy-efficient magnetoelectric spin–orbit logic Beyond CMOS computing with spin and polarization Optical I/O technology for tera-scale computing Device scaling considerations for nanophotonic CMOS global interconnects Coupled-oscillator associative memory array operation for pattern recognition Convolution inference via synchronization of a coupled CMOS oscillator array Benchmarking delay and energy of neural inference circuits
In her new book, A Hole in the Clouds, Maryles Casto shares how, as part of the dramatic economic growth of Silicon Valley, she built her travel business from a $1,500 startup to a $200 million company, serving the needs of the tech industry. She describes how advice from key industry pioneers—such as Intel's Andy Grove and Robert Noyce and V.C.s William Bowes and Irwin Federman—contributed to her perspective on business, and offers invaluable lessons on her strategies that helped the business to thrive despite being in an industry threatened by extinction. She describes how her business success then led her to champion community and cultural organizations. When Maryles Casto left her family's sugar plantation in the Philippines in 1959 and moved to the United States as a new bride, she brought with her a love for travel and the stellar customer-service experience she'd gained as a flight attendant for Philippine Airlines. She never imagined she'd be building a business from scratch in an unfamiliar country. But when her husband went back to school, she needed to find a job. She founded Casto Travel soon after, a company she ran for more than four decades. Join us as Maryles Casto discusses the true story of how she transformed her life from unemployed flight attendant into the CEO of one of the most successful travel companies in the country, and of the many interesting characters she has met along the way! NOTES This program is part of The Commonwealth Club's Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation. SPEAKERS Maryles Casto Chairman and CEO, MVC Solutions; Author, A Hole in the Clouds: From Flight Attendant to Silicon Valley CEO In Conversation with Dr. Gloria Duffy President and CEO, The Commonwealth Club of California In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on November 15th, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In her new book, A Hole in the Clouds, Maryles Casto shares how, as part of the dramatic economic growth of Silicon Valley, she built her travel business from a $1,500 startup to a $200 million company, serving the needs of the tech industry. She describes how advice from key industry pioneers—such as Intel's Andy Grove and Robert Noyce and V.C.s William Bowes and Irwin Federman—contributed to her perspective on business, and offers invaluable lessons on her strategies that helped the business to thrive despite being in an industry threatened by extinction. She describes how her business success then led her to champion community and cultural organizations. When Maryles Casto left her family's sugar plantation in the Philippines in 1959 and moved to the United States as a new bride, she brought with her a love for travel and the stellar customer-service experience she'd gained as a flight attendant for Philippine Airlines. She never imagined she'd be building a business from scratch in an unfamiliar country. But when her husband went back to school, she needed to find a job. She founded Casto Travel soon after, a company she ran for more than four decades. Join us as Maryles Casto discusses the true story of how she transformed her life from unemployed flight attendant into the CEO of one of the most successful travel companies in the country, and of the many interesting characters she has met along the way! NOTES This program is part of The Commonwealth Club's Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation. SPEAKERS Maryles Casto Chairman and CEO, MVC Solutions; Author, A Hole in the Clouds: From Flight Attendant to Silicon Valley CEO In Conversation with Dr. Gloria Duffy President and CEO, The Commonwealth Club of California In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on November 15th, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Will technology permanently solve the problem of human productivity? Does the future look like a life of leisure while robots do all the work we currently do? In a panel discussion at the 2019 Dallas launch of the Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence, George Gilder offered some thoughts on the evening’s topic, “Will ‘Smart’ Machines Take Over… Source
Will technology permanently solve the problem of human productivity? Does the future look like a life of leisure while robots do all the work we currently do? In a panel discussion at the 2019 Dallas launch of the Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence, George Gilder offered some thoughts on the evening’s topic, “Will ‘Smart’ Machines Take Over… Source
Nearly everything is fine in moderation. Plastics exploded as an industry in the post World War II boom of the 50s and on - but goes back far further. A plastic is a category of materials called a polymer. These are materials comprised of long chains of molecules that can be easily found in nature because cellulose, the cellular walls of plants, comes in many forms. But while the word plastics comes from easily pliable materials, we don't usually think of plant-based products as plastics. Instead, we think of the synthetic polymers. But documented uses go back thousands of years, especially with early uses of natural rubbers, milk proteins, gums, and shellacs. But as we rounded the corner into the mid-1800s with the rise of chemistry things picked up steam. That's when Charles Goodyear wanted to keep tires from popping and so discovered vulcanization as a means to treat rubber. Vulcanization is when rubber is heated and mixed with other chemicals like sulphur. Then in 1869 John Wesley Hyatt looked for an alternative to natural ivory for things like billiards. He found that cotton fibers could be treated with camphor, which came from the waxy wood of camphor laurels. The substance could be shaped, dried, and then come off as most anything nature produced. When Wesley innovated plastics most camphor was extracted from trees, but today most camphor is synthetically produced from petroleum-based products, further freeing humans from needing natural materials to produce goods. Not only could we skip killing elephants but we could avoid chopping down forests to meet our needs for goods. Leo Baekeland gave us Bakelite in 1907. By then we were using other materials and the hunt was on for all kinds of materials. Shellac had been used as a moisture sealant for centuries and came from the female lac bugs in trees around India but could also be used to insulate electrical components. Baekeland created a phenol and formaldehyde solution he called Novolak but as with the advent of steel realized that he could change the temperature and how much pressure was applied to the solution that he could make it harder and more moldable - thus Bakelite became the first fully synthetic polymer. Hermann Staudinger started doing more of the academic research to explain why these reactions were happening. In 1920, he wrote a paper that looked at rubber, starch, and other polymers, explaining how their long chains of molecular units were linked by covalent bonds. Thus their high molecular weights. He would go on to collaborate with his wife Magda Voita, who was a bonanist and his polymer theories proven. And so plastics went from experimentation to science. Scientists and experimenters alike continued to investigate uses and by 1925 there was even a magazine called Plastics. They could add filler to Bakelite and create colored plastics for all kinds of uses and started molding jewelry, gears, and other trinkets. They could heat it to 300 degrees and then inject it into molds. And so plastic manufacturing was born. As with many of the things we interact with in our modern world, use grew through the decades and there were other industries that started to merge, evolve, and diverge. Éleuthère Irénée du Pont had worked with gunpowder in France and his family immigrated to the United States after the French Revolution. He'd worked with chemist Antoine Lavoisier while a student and started producing gunpowder in the early 1800s. That company, which evolved into the modern DuPont, always excelled in various materials sciences and through the 1920s also focused on a number of polymers. One of their employees, Wallace Carothers, invented neoprene and so gave us our first super polymer in 1928. He would go on to invent nylon as a synthetic form of silk in 1935. DuPont also brought us Teflon and insecticides in 1935. Acrylic acid went back to the mid-1800s but as people were experimenting with combining chemicals around the same time we saw British chemists John Crawford and Rowland Hill and independently German Otto Röhm develop products based on polymathy methacrylate. Here, they were creating clear, hard plastic to be used like glass. The Brits called theirs Perspex and the Germans called theirs Plexiglas when they went to market, with our friends back at DuPont creating yet another called Lucite. The period between World War I and World War II saw advancements in nearly every science - from mechanical computing to early electrical switching and of course, plastics. The Great Depression saw a slow-down in the advancements but World War II and some of the basic research happening around the world caused an explosion as governments dumped money into build-ups. That's when DuPont cranked out parachutes and tires and even got involved in building the Savannah Hanford plutonium plant as a part of the Manhattan Project. This took them away from things like nylon, which led to riots. We were clearly in the era of synthetics used in clothing. Leading up to the war and beyond, every supply chain of natural goods got constrained. And so synthetic replacements for these were being heavily researched and new uses were being discovered all over the place. Add in assembly lines and we were pumping out things to bring joy or improve lives at a constant clip. BASF had been making dyes since the 1860s but chemicals are chemicals and had developed polystyrene in the 1930s and continued to grow and benefit from both licensing and developing other materials like Styropor insulating foam. Dow Chemical had been founded in the 1800s by Herbert Henry Dow, but became an important part of the supply chain for the growing synthetics businesses, working with Corning to produce silicones and producing styrene and magnesium for light parts for aircraft. They too would help in nuclear developments, managing the Rocky Flats plutonium triggers plant and then napalm, Agent Orange, breast implants, plastic bottles, and anything else we could mix chemicals with. Expanded polystyrene led to plastics in cups, packaging, and anything else. By the 60s we were fully in a synthetic world. A great quote from 1967's “The Graduate” was “I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Are you listening? Plastics.” The future was here. And much of that future involved injection molding machines, now more and more common. Many a mainframe was encased in metal but with hard plastics we could build faceplates out of plastic. The IBM mainframes had lots of blinking lights recessed into holes in plastic with metal switches sticking out. Turns out people get shocked less when the whole thing isn't metal. The minicomputers were smaller but by the time of the PDP-11 there were plastic toggles and a plastic front on the chassis. The Altair 8800 ended up looking a lot like that, but bringing that technology to the hobbyist. By the time the personal computer started to go mainstream, the full case was made of injection molding. The things that went inside computers were increasingly plastic as well. Going back to the early days of mechanical computing, gears were made out of metal. But tubes were often mounted on circuits screwed to wooden boards. Albert Hanson had worked on foil conductors that were laminated to insulating boards going back to 1903 but Charles Ducas patented electroplating circuit patterns in 1927 and Austrian Paul Eisler invented printed circuits for radio sets in the mid-1930s. John Sargrove then figured out he could spray metal onto plastic boards made of Bakelite in the late 1930s and uses expanded to proximity fuzes in World War II and then Motorola helped bring them into broader consumer electronics in the early 1950s. Printed circuit boards then moved to screen printing metallic paint onto various surfaces and Harry Rubinstein patented printing components, which helped pave the way for integrated circuits. Board lamination and etching was added to the process and conductive inks used in the creation might be etched copper, plated substrates or even silver inks as are used in RFID tags. We've learned over time to make things easier and with more precise machinery we were able to build smaller and smaller boards, chips, and eventually 3d printed electronics - even the Circuit Scribe to draw circuits. Doug Engelbart's first mouse was wood but by the time Steve Jobs insisted they be mass produceable they'd been plastic for Englebart and then the Alto. Computer keyboards had evolved out of the flexowriter and so become plastic as well. Even the springs that caused keys to bounce back up eventually replaced with plastic and rubberized materials in different configurations. Plastic is great for insulating electronics, they are poor conductors of heat, they're light, they're easy to mold, they're hardy, synthetics require less than 5% of the oil we use, and they're recyclable. Silicone, another polymer, is a term coined by the English chemist F.S. Kipping in 1901. His academic work while at University College, Nottingham would kickstart the synthetic rubber and silicone lubricant industries. But that's not silicon. That's an element and a tetravalent metalloid at that. Silicon was discovered in 1787 by Antoine Lavoisier. Yup the same guy that taught Du Pont. While William Shockley started off with germanium and silicon when he was inventing the transistor, it was Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce who realized how well it acted as an insulator or a semiconductor it ended up used in what we now think of as the microchip. But again, that's not a plastic… Plastic of course has its drawbacks. Especially since we don't consume plastics in moderation. It takes 400 to a thousand years do decompose many plastics. The rampant use in every aspect of our lives has led to animals dying after eating plastic, or getting caught in islands of it as plastic is all over the oceans and other waterways around the world. That's 5 and a quarter trillion pieces of plastic in the ocean that weighs a combined 270,000 tons with another 8 million pieces flowing in there each and every day. In short, the overuse of plastics is hurting our environment. Or at least our inability to control our rampant consumerism is leading to their overuse. They do melt at low temperatures, which can work as a good or bad thing. When they do, they can release hazardous fumes like PCBs and dioxins. Due to many of the chemical compounds they often rely on fossil fuels and so are derived from non-renewable resources. But they're affordable and represent a trillion dollar industry. And we can all do better at recycling - which of course requires energy and those bonds break down over time so we can't recycle forever. Oh and the byproducts from the creation of products is downright toxic. We could argue that plastic is one of the most important discoveries in the history of humanity. That guy from The Graduate certainly would. We could argue it's one of the worst. But we also just have to realize that our modern lives, and especially all those devices we carry around, wouldn't be possible without plastics and other synthetic polymers. There's a future where instead of running out to the store for certain items, we just 3d print them. Maybe we even make filament from printed materials we no longer need. The move to recyclable materials for packaging helps reduce the negative impacts of plastics. But so does just consuming less. Except devices. We obviously need the latest and greatest of each of those all the time! Here's the thing, half of plastics are single-purpose. Much of it is packaging like containers and wrappers. But can you imagine life without the 380 million tons of plastics the world produces a year? Just look around right now. Couldn't tell you how many parts of this microphone, computer, and all the cables and adapters are made of it. How many couldn't be made by anything else. There was a world without plastics for thousands of years of human civilization. We'll look at one of those single-purpose plastic-heavy industries called fast food in an episode soon. But it's not the plastics that are such a problem. It's the wasteful rampant consumerism. When I take out my recycling I can't help but think that what goes in the recycling versus compost versus garbage is as much a symbol of who I want to be as what I actually end up eating and relying on to live. And yet, I remain hopeful for the world in that these discoveries can actually end up bringing us back into harmony with the world around us without reverting to luddites and walking back all of these amazing developments like we see in the science fiction dystopian futures.
The Agenda
Audio source: https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/berkshire-hathaway-part-iTranscriptI think maybe in part because of this mindset of like I'm going to stay true to do what I'm good at, he makes the biggest missed opportunity ever maybe in history. I was teasing Ben, over the last couple days texting him saying, I've got something in this episode that I don't know if you know but is just the most unbelievable thing that you will never imagine.Ben: Lay it on me.David: In 1967, he writes his partners saying that he's introducing a new ground rule to the partnership. This one is quite literally the opposite of Don Valentine. He says, “We will not go into businesses where technology, which is way over my head, is crucial to the investment decision. I know about as much about semiconductors or integrated circuits as I do about the mating habits of this chrząszcz.” It a Polish word. It means beetle in Polish. Typical Warren way with words here. “This is very unfortunate.”Ben: What was the company?David: “Very unfortunate decision to make.”Ben: Let's see, 1967. It predates Microsoft by seven years, predates Apple. It's way after IBM. What's around this time, DEC? No, it's post-DEC.David: No, you'll get it if you think about it enough. Silicon Valley, or just as we talked about it a lot on the show.Ben: Is it an early Sequoia investment?David: Just pre-Sequoia. Sequoia was started in 1972, but this is all the crew that Don Valentine—Ben: Is it an Arthur Rock investment?David: It is an Arthur Rock investment.Ben: Is it Intel?David: We're talking about Intel here.Ben: No way.David: Get this. Buffett, at this point, is on the board of Grinnell College in Iowa. He's a trustee of Grinnell College, which by the way, he was introduced to by Susie. Susie became an incredible civil rights activist and Grinnell College was involved in the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King spoke at Grinnell College six months before he was killed. Susie brings Warren to the college to listen to King speak. Warren is like incredibly moved by Dr. King.He decides after that to join the board. They were trying to recruit him to join the board, so he does. Do you know who else was on the board? One of Grinnell College's most famous alumni, alongside Warren Buffett?Ben: Noyce or Moore.David: Yes, bingo. Robert Noyce.Ben: Wow.David: Alumni of Grinnell College, inventor of the integrated circuit, part of the traitorous eight, who left Shockley Semiconductor to start Fairchild, and then co-founder of Intel with Gordon Moore and Andy Grove is on the board of Grinnell with Warren. Not only has that, but Warren chairs the endowment investment committee at Grinnell. Of course, that would make sense. When Noyce leaves to start Intel and Arthur Rock is putting the deal together to finance Intel, Noyce brings it to the investment committee at Grinnell College and says, there's $100,000 piece. I think Grinnell should invest in this company. I think this is really going to be big. I know what I'm doing.Ben: He saw the deal.David: Warren approves the investment and Grinnell does invest $100,000 in the Intel seed round effectively. But Warren never goes near it for the partnership, for himself. In fact says, I will never invest in technology companies. Unreal.Ben: Basically held to that for another 45+ years.David: Totally. Not until Apple and I think—I haven't done the research yet—Apple bubbles up within Berkshire from Todd Combs, not from Warren. Talk about sins of omission. This is before Sequoia. Imagine if Warren had financed Intel, Warren Buffett could have been Warren Buffet plus Sequoia Capital.Ben: Wow. Realistically, what would he have done with it if he did invest in it? First of all, he's never invested in technology business to this point. He's never invested in something that early. Everything he's bought has been pieces of public companies.David: Yup. Established on-going cash flow businesses.
On 25th April, some of the interesting events that took place were: 1901: Car License plates were used for the first time in New York State. 1961: Robert Noyce got patent for integrated circuit, also called Microchip. Listen in to know more interesting things that happened today. www.chimesradio.com http://onelink.to/8uzr4g https://www.facebook.com/chimesradio/ https://www.instagram.com/vrchimesradio/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
It's time. After 150+ episodes on great companies, we tackle the granddaddy of them all — Berkshire Hathaway. One episode alone isn't nearly enough to do Warren and Poor Charlie justice, so today we present Part I: Warren's story. How did a folksy, middle-class kid from Omaha become the single greatest capitalist of all-time? Why, like Jordan, did he retire (twice!) at the top of his game, only to reinvent himself and come back stronger than ever? As always, we dive in. Let's dance. If you love Acquired and want more, join our LP Community for access to over 50 LP-only episodes, monthly Zoom calls, and live access for big events like emergency pods and book club discussions with authors. We can't wait to see you there. Join here at: https://acquired.fm/lp/ Sponsors: Thanks to Tiny for being our presenting sponsor for all of Acquired Season 8. Tiny is building the "Berkshire Hathaway of the internet" — something they're so dedicated to, they even make and sell bronze busts of Warren & Charlie online! if you own a wonderful internet business that you want to sell, or know someone who does, you should get in touch with them. Just like Berkshire, they commit to quick, simple diligence, a 30-day or less process, and will leave your business to do its thing for the long term. You can learn more about Tiny here: http://bit.ly/acquiredtiny and find their Berkshire Nerds store here: http://bit.ly/acquiredbrknerds Thank you as well to Vouch and to Capchase. You can learn more about them at: https://bit.ly/acquired-vouch http://bit.ly/acquiredcapchase The Warren Buffett Playbook: (also available on our website at https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/berkshire-hathaway-part-i ) 1. Money can create more money. (aka "Compounding") Very early in life, Warren figured out something most people never truly grasp: money can be used to generate more money. It's sounds simple, but once you fully internalize this concept, you'll never see the world the same again. A given sum no longer represents what you could buy with it — a coffee, a phone, a car, a house, etc — but rather what it could grow to become over time. At the extreme, people like Warren are "cursed", seeing prices for goods not as whatever the sticker says, but 5x, 10x, 20x higher — because that's what the opportunity cost of parting with the capital represents. If you own an asset that's compounding at a high rate with no obvious reason it will stop... dear lord do not interrupt it!! Most people are tempted to meddle: lock in gains, cover other losses, actively trade, or otherwise "manage" their investments. In the long run these actions are almost assuredly all value-destructive behaviors if you own truly great businesses. 2. Align incentives: be a doctor, not a prescriptionist. Warren likened stockbrokers — who got paid based on volume of trades placed, not investment performance — to "prescriptionist" doctors who were paid by their number and type of pills prescribed, versus actual patient outcomes. Once Warren created his investment partnerships (and then later transformed Berkshire Hathaway into something similar), he not only unlocked hugely better outcomes for his"patients", but allowed created a path to pursue his own dream and become fabulously wealthy in the process. 3. You can't expect to control other people's emotions around money (or anything else). However with the right "ground rules", you can mitigate the impact of others on your business and decision making — and even use them to your advantage. Warren's early partnerships had a few ground rules and norms: partners will not know what securities are held, trading in/out is allowed only 1 day / year, and Warren will consistently set low expectations (leaving himself ample room to over-deliver). These set the stage for nearly complete freedom for Warren to operate as he saw fit — to the immense gain of his limited partners. 4. Sins of omission (selling or passing) nearly always cost more than sins of commission (buying). Warren is almost without doubt the greatest investor of all time. However even he made three incredibly stupid "unforced errors" early in his career that cost hundreds of billions in future gains: selling GEICO, selling American Express, and passing on the opportunity to invest in Intel with Arthur Rock. That said, Warren's fourth great mistake (and in his estimation his greatest) was certainly a sin of commission: buying Berkshire Hathaway itself. Warren estimates this single blunder totaled $200B+ in opportunity cost over his lifetime. Carve Outs: Ben: Year One of Not Boring: https://www.notboring.co/p/a-not-boring-adventure-one-year-in David: Balaji Srinivasan on The Tim Ferriss Show: https://tim.blog/2021/03/24/balaji-srinivasan/ Episode Sources: https://berkshirehathaway.com/reports.html https://einvestingforbeginners.com/warren-buffetts-ground-rules/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Schroeder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Graham https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkshire_Hathaway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Buffett https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by_market_capitalization#2021 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Chace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Noyce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salad_Oil_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seabury_Stanton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Pacific_Railroad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_Falls_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_Crash_of_1929 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._Ruane https://fundooprofessor.wordpress.com/2012/07/09/flirting-with-floats-part-i/ https://fundooprofessor.wordpress.com/2012/07/16/flirting-with-floats-part-ii/ https://fundooprofessor.wordpress.com/2012/12/06/httpsdl-dropbox-comu28494399bloglinksfloats_and_moats-pdf/ https://medium.com/@madmedic11671/how-salad-oil-almost-crashed-the-u-s-economy-c3ed3c2cb797 https://minesafetydisclosures.com/blog/2017/4/16/berkshire-hathaway-brkb https://novelinvestor.com/happy-hour-wild-ride-geico/ https://qz.com/emails/quartz-obsession/1269094/ https://static.fmgsuite.com/media/documents/1bae1ba7-c2f2-4af5-ac1f-c0429dc7e5f0.pdf https://www.amazon.com/Buffett-American-Capitalist-Roger-Lowenstein/dp/0812979273 https://www.amazon.com/Poor-Charlies-Almanack-Charles-Expanded/dp/1578645018 https://www.amazon.com/Snowball-Warren-Buffett-Business-Life/dp/0553805096 https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1995.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/31/warren-buffett-on-his-successful-relationship-with-charlie-munger.html https://www.hbomax.com/feature/urn:hbo:feature:GWEW13AjEq0vCwwEAAAAH https://www.nationalindemnity.com/About_History.aspx https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/04/business/04buffett.html https://www.tilsonfunds.com/BRK.pdf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjXZbW8ALRA&t=463s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsDYatBvwYI&t=127s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFEwN7j0IWw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZNqLWe5o2Q&t=171s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJzu_xItNkY https://www2.census.gov/prod2/popscan/p60-001.pdf https://yale.app.box.com/s/8lb7yqca5tmfcjbjhhuw5xft7i1ddttj
2015 Audie Award Finalist for Non-Fiction Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, The Innovators is Walter Isaacson's revealing story of the people who created the computer and the Internet. It is destined to be the standard history of the digital revolution and an indispensable guide to how innovation really happens. What were the talents that allowed certain inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into disruptive realities? What led to their creative leaps? Why did some succeed and others fail? In his masterly saga, Isaacson begins with Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's daughter, who pioneered computer programming in the 1840s. He explores the fascinating personalities that created our current digital revolution, such as Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, J.C.R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Robert Noyce, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Tim Berners-Lee, and Larry Page. This is the story of how their minds worked and what made them so inventive. It's also a narrative of how their ability to collaborate and master the art of teamwork made them even more creative. For an era that seeks to foster innovation, creativity, and teamwork, The Innovators shows how they happen.
What I learned from reading The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley by Leslie Berlin.Upgrade to the Misfit feed and automatically unlock every full length episode. Upgrade now to get access to 145 full-length episodes available nowhere else. Learn the key insights from biographies on Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, John D. Rockefeller, Coco Chanel, Andrew Carnegie, Enzo Ferrari, Dr. Suess, Estee Lauder, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Phil Knight, Joseph Pulitzer, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bill Gates, P.T. Barnum, Edwin Land, Henry Ford, Walter Chrysler, Thomas Edison, David Ogilvy, Ben Franklin, Howard Hughes, George Lucas, Levi Strauss, Walt Disney and so many more. Upgrade now by tapping this link.
What I learned from reading Swimming Across by Andrew S. Grove. Subscribe to continue listening and gain access to all full episodes. All subscriptions come with a 7-day free trial. What other people are saying:“Uniquely outstanding. No fluff and all substance. David does an outstanding job summarizing these biographies and hones in on the elements that make his subjects so unique among entrepreneurs. I particularly enjoy that he focuses on both the founder’s positive and negative characteristics as a way of highlighting things to mimic and avoid.”“Without a doubt, the highest value-to-cost ratio I’ve taken advantage of in the last year is the Founders podcast premium feed. Tap into eons of knowledge and experiences, condensed into digestible portions, for roughly the cost of a takeout meal. Highly, highly recommend.“I haven’t found a better return on my time and money than your podcast for inspiration and time-tested wisdom to help me on my journey.“It is worth every penny. I cannot put into words how fantastic this podcast is. Just stop reading this and get the full access.”“Reading a biography is a privilege that condenses a life's journey, all its lessons, loves AND mistakes into 20 odd hours of reading. Here David condenses many of the best and intriguing Bios into 1-2 hours. Presented organically and thoughtfully with full book links and show notes for ease. Subscribe right away!”START YOUR 7 DAY FREE TRIAL HERE.
What I learned from reading The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson.Subscribe to continue listening and gain access to all full episodes. All subscriptions come with a 7-day free trial. What other people are saying:“Uniquely outstanding. No fluff and all substance. David does an outstanding job summarizing these biographies and hones in on the elements that make his subjects so unique among entrepreneurs. I particularly enjoy that he focuses on both the founder’s positive and negative characteristics as a way of highlighting things to mimic and avoid.”“Without a doubt, the highest value-to-cost ratio I’ve taken advantage of in the last year is the Founders podcast premium feed. Tap into eons of knowledge and experiences, condensed into digestible portions, for roughly the cost of a takeout meal. Highly, highly recommend.“I haven’t found a better return on my time and money than your podcast for inspiration and time-tested wisdom to help me on my journey.“It is worth every penny. I cannot put into words how fantastic this podcast is. Just stop reading this and get the full access.”“Reading a biography is a privilege that condenses a life's journey, all its lessons, loves AND mistakes into 20 odd hours of reading. Here David condenses many of the best and intriguing Bios into 1-2 hours. Presented organically and thoughtfully with full book links and show notes for ease. Subscribe right away!”START YOUR 7 DAY FREE TRIAL HERE.
American technology company Intel has rebranded its logo with the release of its 11th generation chips. The company decided to remodel the logo with a simpler typeface but retained some of its trademark elements, such as the classic blue coloring. Intel Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer Karen Walker said that the rebranding showcases the company's new motivation, future directions, and goals. According to Walker, the company is planning to go beyond PC chips and venture into other world-changing innovations. The company had undergone two major rebrandings in the past: one in 1969 and another in 2006. Walker explained that the latest changes were inspired by a statement from Intel co-founder Robert Noyce, who encouraged Intel employees to not be encumbered by history and to achieve wonderful things. She added that the new logo also shows Intel's commitment to tackling global issues, such as climate change and the lack of diversity in the tech industry. According to Walker, the company feels an urgent desire to use the breadth of its influence to make a positive impact on the world. Aside from the logo, a new version of Intel's signature five-note tune will be released. The tune was recreated using a synthesizer instead of the xylophone and marimba chimes that were used in the original.
The unique story of Intel the American multinational corporation of microprocessors.
This episode discusses Robert Noyce's early life, career and research, and impact on the computer science field. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app
www.JeffHeggie.com Jeff Heggie Daily Success Strategies Hey welcome Jeff Heggie Daily Success Strategies. Thanks for being with me today. Today. I want to talk about something that I hear quite often, and it's, especially when I talk to people that have been in their career or different things for awhile, and they talk about the things they wish they would have done in their lives. They wish they would have started a business. They wished they would have taken a chance. They wished they would have done all these things, but now they've been in a certain role or they're at a certain age that they don't think they can do it anymore. And the example I always give them is Colonel Sanders with Kentucky Fried Chicken. He started that when he was 61 years old and look what it is now. And so what's holding you back from starting something, age is just a number and it doesn't mean because you're a certain age you're locked in and you can't do the things that you really want to and really desire to do. You can still do those. I got something from one of my coaches today, someone that coaches me on a regular basis and I was reading it. And that's why I wanted to talk about it today because there's a number of people on his list that actually expanded my how I looked at this. So I'm going to read you what he sent me. Ray Kroc opened his first McDonald's at age 52. Rodney Dangerfield was 46 when he got his break. Martha Stewart was over 50 before she started her brand. Stan Lee of Marvel comics was 42 when he started. Henry Ford was 41 When he founded Ford motor company, Melissa McCarthy was 41 when her wheels started turning Robert Noyce was also 41 when he started Intel. Morgan Freeman was 52 when he got his first big break, a Joy Behar was 55. When she started The View. Chaleo Yoovidhya was 61 When he started Red Bull. Judy Dench wasn't famous until 61. Colonel Sanders was 61 when he started Kentucky fried chicken. So I want you to think about that and think about how successful those people have become and the things they've achieved and when they started. So if you're looking at yourself and thinking, I wish I would've done that, I wish I could've been this. I wish I could've been that, but I can't now because I'm 40, I'm 50, I'm 60 I'm 70. I don't care how old you are. There's still time. 2020 is the year to do it. If there's ever been a time that you want to reset, that you want to take advantage of opportunities. Now's the time to do it. This is the year that has thrown everything into a loop. And it's given you the opportunity that if you want to do something now is the perfect time to do it. So I really encourage you to do that. Go out there, figure out what it is you want to do and do it. And again, go to www.JeffHeggie.com, get my free Momentum series. It's going to help you figure out what it is you really want, how you're going to get there and why it is and get the motivation behind it. It's a free series. Go get it. Motivation series, go to www.JeffHeggie.com. Scroll down. You'll be able to see that. And hopefully this is something that'll help you, and help you make some decisions to move forward and take some action. And if it is, please share this with someone else that could use it as well. Thanks for being with me today and we will see you again tomorrow. Thanks.
Want more Acquired? Join thousands of other founders, CEOs, VCs, product people and engineers learning in the Acquired Limited Partner Program: https://glow.fm/acquired/ When you think of Intel today, you probably think of the microprocessor company. Maybe you also think about about 'Intel Inside' and their famous jingle. You might even think "big, stable, boring public company". But for the first two decades of Intel's life, absolutely none of those things were true. Today we tell the incredible story of how the company that started it all in Silicon Valley clawed back from a crisis that brought them to the brink of death, and of one man who rose as the ultimate survivor to become their leader and a legend even in his own time: the late, great Andy Grove. Note: This episode originally aired as part of Podapalooza, a podcast festival organized by our friends at Glow to benefit COVID relief. Find out more and support the cause at https://www.plza.org Sponsor: Thanks to Silicon Valley Bank for being our banner sponsor for Adapting and Acquired Season 6. You can learn more about SVB here: https://www.svb.com/impact Thank you as well to Wilson Sonsini - You can learn more about WSGR at: https://www.wsgr.com/ Sources: Only the Paranoid Survive: https://www.amazon.com/Only-Paranoid-Survive-Exploit-Challenge-ebook/dp/B0036S4B2G Swimming Across: https://www.amazon.com/Swimming-Across-Andrew-S-Grove-ebook/dp/B07CJRM4DX/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Moore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Noyce https://www.businessinsider.com/alan-patricof-greycroft-ipo-market-2011-1 https://anthonysmoak.com/2016/03/27/andy-grove-and-intels-move-from-memory-to-microprocessors/ http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_History/Intel_386_Business_Strategy/102701962.05.01.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80386 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley https://www.inc.com/ilan-mochari/remembering-andy-grove-intel.html
About the Lecture: Michael C. Maibach will discuss reasons why the Founders agreed on the Electoral College and give a response to its main criticisms. About the Speaker: Michael C. Maibach is a seasoned professional in global business diplomacy, advisor to non-profit organizations, and a supporter of civic causes. From 2003 to 2012 he was President & CEO of the European-American Business Council, a group of 75 multinational companies.From 1983 to 2001 Mr. Maibach was Vice President of Global Government Affairs for the Intel Corporation. At Intel he worked closely with its founders, Dr. Robert Noyce – inventor of the integrated circuit, Dr. Gordon Moore – known for Moore's Law – and Dr. Andy Grove – Time Man of the Year in 1997. At Intel he built a team of 150 professionals around the world to advance public policy to enhance trade, job and wealth creation. Today he is the Founder & Director of The Center For the Electoral College. Mr. Maibach has earned seven university degrees, one of which was granted by The Institute of World Politics. While earning his first degree he was elected to the DeKalb County Board in his native state of Illinois, becoming the first person elected to public office under 21 years of age in American history.
Bu bölümümüzde Cengiz Riva Hocamız modern dünyanın deyim yerindeyse temel yapı taşlarından biri olan transistörlerin tarihini, kullanım alanlarını ve gelişim sürecinde yaşanan olayları bizlere aktarmaktadır. Değerli bilgilerini bizlerle paylaştığı için kendisine teşekkür ediyoruz. 00:10 Giriş 00:33 İlk transistörlerin doğuşu ve kullanım alanları 02:40 İlkel transistörler ve lambalı radyolar 03:26 Gazların kullanımı ile yapılan ilk diyotlar ve transistörler, vakum tüpleri, ilk bilgisayar: ENIAC 06:03 Vakum tüplerinin olumsuz tarafları ve kullanımında yaşanan sorunlar 07:00 Katı haldeki bir malzemenin iletkenliğinin kontrolü, ilk modern transistörler 07:45 Hain sekizli kimdir? Bell Laboratuvarları'nda bulunan transistörler piyasaya nasıl çıkmıştır? Fairchild, IBM ve anlaşmalar. 09:30 Robert Noyce, ilk monolitik tümleşik devrenin üretimi 09:55 Tümleşik devrelerde yaşanan patent tartışmaları 11:40 İlk üretilen tümleşik devrelerin kullanım alanları; Apollo ve RTL chipler 12:10 Transistörlerin kullanım alanları, anahtarlama ve kuvvetlendirme 15:12 Moore Yasası, günümüz transistörlerinin boyutları 16:27 Teşekkür ve kapanış http://www.tapirlab.com
“These were, by their résumés, very superior people. And I thought, gee, maybe there is something here, something more valuable than just being an employee. - Arthur Rock, venture capitalistOn a hot summer morning in San Francisco in 1957, eight of the most talented young scientists in America convened for a clandestine meeting at the Clift Hotel. They gathered over breakfast in the famed Redwood Room, a bastion of the city's old guard. A nervous energy consumed the table, fueled by uncertainty, possibility, and fresh-brewed coffee. The eight worked on developing silicon semiconductors—a groundbreaking new technology—at Shockley Semiconductor outside of Palo Alto. The company's founder, Nobel Prize–winning scientist William Shockley, was a brilliant but difficult manager: erratic, mistrustful, and impatient. He had even gone so far as to hire detectives to give his employees lie-detector tests, and these employees, experts in a field in which there were few, were frustrated and angry.After considering numerous options, the men decided they must defect. They planned to establish their own company under the leadership of MIT graduate Robert Noyce, a charming, personable twenty-nine-year-old electrical engineer from smalltown Iowa. Getting Noyce on board hadn't been easy. He was the leader they needed, but he had a young family, and he needed to be persuaded to leave his guaranteed paycheck for something with no model—creating a new company in a new field based on nothing more than combined knowledge, faith, ideas, and passion.As Tom Wolfe would later write in Esquire:“In this business, it dawned on them, capital assets in the traditional sense of plant, equipment, and raw materials counted for next to nothing. The only plant you needed was a shed big enough for the worktables. The only equipment you needed was some kilns, goggles, microscopes, tweezers, and diamond cutters. The materials, silicon and germanium, came from dirt and coal. Brainpower was the entire franchise.”Brainpower was the entire franchise.....
Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us to innovate of the future! Todays episode is is on the microphone. Now you might say “wait, that's not a computer-thing. But given that every computer made in the past decade has one, including your phone, I would beg to differ. Also, every time I record one of these episodes, I seem to get a little better with wielding the instruments, which has led me to spend way more time than is probably appropriate learning about them. So what exactly is a microphone? Well, it's a simple device that converts mechanical waves of energy into electrical waves of energy. Microphones have a diaphragm, much as we humans do and that diaphragm mirrors the sound waves it picks up. So where did these microphones come from? Well, Robert Hooke got the credit for hooking a string to a cup in 1665 and suddenly humans could push sound over distances. Then in 1827 Charles Wheatstone, who invented the telegraph put the word microphone into our vernacular. 1861 rolls around and Johan Philipp Reis build the Reis telephone, which electrified the microphone using a metallic strip that was attached to a vibrating membrane. When a little current was passed through it, it reproduced sound far away. Think of this as more of using electricity to amplify the effects of the string on the cup. But critically, sound had been turned into signal. In 1876, Emile Berliner built a modern microphone while working on the gramophone. He was working with Thomas Edison at the time and would go on to sell the patent for the Microphone to The Bell Telephone Company. Now, Alexander Graham Bell had designed a telephone transmitter in 1876 but ended up in a patent dispute with David Edward Hughes. And as he did with many a great idea, Thomas Edison made the first practical microphone in 1886. This was a carbon microphone that would go on to be used for almost a hundred years. It could produce sound but it kinda' sucked for music. It was used in the first radio broadcast in New York in 1910. The name comes from the cranes of carbon that are packed between two metal plates. Edison would end up introducing the diaphragm and the carbon button microphone would become the standard. That microphone though, often still had a built0-in amp, strengthening the voltage that was the signal sound had been converted to. 1915 rolls around and we get the vacuum tube amplifier. And in 1916, E.C. Wente of Bell Laboratories designed the condenser microphone. This still used two plates, but each had an electrical charge and when the sound vibrations moved the plates, the signal was electronically amplified. Georg Neumann then had the idea to use gold plated PVC and design the mic such that as sound reached the back of the microphone it would be cancelled, resulting in a cardioid pattern, making it the first cardioid microphone and an ancestor to the microphone I'm using right now. In the meantime, other advancements were coming. Electromagnets made it possible to add moving coils and ribbons and Wente and A.C. Thuras would then invent the dynamic, or moving-coil microphone in 1931. This was much more of an omnidirectional pattern and It wasn't until 1959 that the Unidyne III became the first mic to pull in sound from the top of the mic, which would change the shape and look of the microphone forever. Then in 1964 Bell Labs brought us the electrostatic transducer mic and the microphone exploded with over a billion of these built every year. Then Sennheiser gave us clip-on microphones in the 80s, calling their system the Mikroport and releasing it through Telefunken. No, Bootsie Collins was not a member of Telefunken. He'd been touring with James Brown for awhile ad by then was with the Parliament Funkadelic. Funk made a lot of use of all these innovations in sound though. So I see why you might be confused. Other than the fact that all of this was leading us up to a point of being able to use microphones in computers, where's the connection? Well, remember Bell Labs? In 1962 they invented the electret microphone. Here the electrically biased diaphragms have a capacitor that changes with the vibrations of sound waves. Robert Noyce had given us the integrated circuit in 1959 and of microphones couldn't escape the upcoming Moore's law, as every electronics industry started looking for applications. Honeywell came along with silicon pressure sensors, and by 65 Harvey Nathanson gave us a resonant-gated transistors. That would be put on a Monolithic chip by 66 and through the 70s micro sensors were developed to isolate every imaginable environmental parameter, including sound. At this point, computers were still big hulking things. But computers and sound had been working their way into the world for a couple of decades. The technologies would evolve into one another at some point obviously. In 1951, Geoff Hill pushed pules to a speaker using the Australian CSIRAC and Max Mathews at Bell Labs had been doing sound generation on an IBM 704 using the MUSIC program, which went a step further and actually created digital audio using PCM, or Pulse-Code Modulation. The concept of sending multiplexed signals over a wire had started with the telegraph back in the 1870s but the facsimile, or fax machine, used it as far back as 1920. But the science and the math wasn't explaining it all to allow for the computer to handle the rules required. It was Bernard Oliver and Claude Shannon that really put PCM on the map. We've mentioned Claude Shannon on the podcast before. He met Alan Turing in 43 and went on to write crazy papers like A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography, Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems, and A Mathematical Theory of Communications. And he helped birth the field of information theory. When the math nerds showed up, microphones got way cooler. By the way, he liked to juggle on a unicycle. I would too if I could. They documented that you could convert audio to digital by sampling audio and modulation would be mapping the audio on a sine wave at regular intervals. This analog-to-digital converter could then be printed on a chip that would output encoded digital data that would live on storage. Demodulate that with a digital to analog converter, apply an amplification, and you have the paradigm for computer sound. There's way more, like anti-aliasing and reconstruction filters, but someone will always think you're over-simplifying. So the evolutions came, giving us multi-track stereo casettes, the fax machines and eventually getting to the point that this recording will get exported into a 16-bit PCM wave file. PCM would end up evolving to LPCM, or Linear pulse-control modulation and be used in CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray's. Oh and lossleslly compressed to mp3, mpeg4, etc. By the 50s, MIT hackers would start producing sound and even use the computer to emit the same sounds Captain Crunch discovered the tone for, so they could make free phone calls. They used a lot of paper tape then, but with magnetic tape and then hard drives, computers would become more and more active in audio. By 61 John Kelly Jr and Carol Lockbaum made an IBM 7094 mainframe sing Daisy Bell. Arthur C. Clarke happened to see it and that made it into 2001: A Space Odyssey. Remember hearing it sing that when it was getting taken apart? But the digital era of sound recording is marked as starting with the explosion of Sony in the 1970s. Moore's Law, they got smaller, faster, and cheaper and by the 2000s microelectromechanical microphones web mainstream, which are what are built into laptops, cell phones, and headsets. You see, by then it was all on a single chip. Or even shared a chip. These are still mostly omnidirectional. But in modern headphones, like Apple AirPods then you're using dual beam forming microphones. Beamforming uses multiple sensor arrays to extract sounds based on a whole lot of math; the confluence of machine learning and the microphone. You see, humans have known to do many of these things for centuries. We hooked a cup to a wire and sound came out the other side. We electrified it. We then started going from engineering to pure science. We then analyzed it with all the math so we better understood the rules. And that last step is when it's time to start writing software. Or sometimes it's controlling things with software that gives us the necessary understanding to make the next innovative leap. The invention of the microphone doesn't really belong to one person. Hook, Wheatstone, Reis, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Wente, Thuras, Shannon, Hill, Matthews, and many, many more had a hand in putting that crappy mic in your laptop, the really good mic in your cell phone, and the stupidly good mic in your headphones. Some are even starting to move over to Piezoelectric. But I think I'll save that for another episode. The microphone is a great example of that slow, methodical rise, and iterative innovation that makes technologies truly lasting. It's not always shockingly abrupt or disruptive. But those innovations are permanently world-changing. Just think, because of the microphone and computer getting together for a blind date in the 40s you can now record your hit album in Garage Band. For free. Or you call your parents any time you want. Now pretty much for free. So thank you for sticking with me through all of this. It's been a blast. You should probably call your parents now. I'm sure they'd love to hear from you. But before you do, thank you for tuning in to yet another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We're so lucky to have you. Have a great day!
Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us for the innovations of the future! Today we're going to look at the Tech Model Railroad Club, an obsessive group of young computer hackers that helped to shape a new vision for the young computer industry through the late 50s and early 60s. We've all seen parodies it in the movies. Queue up a montage. Iron Man just can't help but tinker with new models of his armor. Then viola, these castaway hack jobs are there when a new foe comes along. As is inspiration to finish them. The Lambda Lamda Lamda guys get back at the jock frat boys in Revenge of the Nerds. The driven inventor in Honey I Shrunk the Kids just can't help himself but build the most insane inventions. Peter Venkman in Ghostbusters. There's a drive. And those who need to understand, to comprehend, to make sense of what was non-sensical before. I guess it even goes back to Dr Frankenstein. Some science just isn't meant to be conquered. But trains. Those are meant to be conquered. They're the golden spike into the engineering chasm that young freshman who looked like the cast of Stand By Me, but at MIT, wanted to conquer. You went to MIT in the 50s and 60s because you wanted a deeper understanding of how the world worked. But can you imagine a world where the unofficial motto of the MIT math department was that “there's no such thing as computer science. It's witchcraft!” The Tech Model Railroad Club, or TMRC, had started in 1946. World War II had ended the year before and the first first UN General Assembly and Security Council met, with Iran filing the first complaint against the Soviet Union and UNICEF being created. Syria got their independence from France. Jordan got their independence from Britain. The Philippines gained their independence from the US. Truman enacted the CIA, Stalin accounted a 5 year plan for Russia, ushering in the era of Soviet reconstruction and signaling the beginning of the col war, which would begin the next year. Anti-British protests exploded in India, and Attlee agreed to their independence. Ho Chi Minh became president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and France recognized their statehood days later, with war between his forces and the French breaking out later that year resulting in French martial law. Churchill gave his famous Iron Curtain Speech. Italy and Bulgaria abolished their monarchies. The US Supreme Court ordered desegregation of busses and Truman ordered desegregation of the armed forces and created the Committee on Civil Rights using an executive order. And there was no true computer industry. But the ENIAC went into production in 1946. And a group of kids at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology weren't thinking much about the new world order being formed nor about the ENIAC which was being installed just a 5 or 6 hour drive away. They were thinking about model trains. And over the next few years they would build, paint, and make these trains run on model tracks. Started by Walter Marvin and John Fitzallen Moore, who would end up with over a dozen patents after earning his PhD from Columbia and having a long career at Lockheed, EMI Medical who invented the CT scan. By the mid-50s the club had grown and there were a few groups of people who were really in it for different things. Some wanted to drink cocacola while they painted trains. But the thing that drew many a student though was the ARRC, or Automatic Railroad Running Computer. This was built by the Signals and Power Subcommittee who used relays from telephone switches to make the trains do all kinds of crazy things, even cleaning the tracks. Today there we're hacking genes, going to lifehacker.com, and sometimes regrettably getting hacked, or losing data in a breach. But the term came from one who chops or cuts, going back to the 1200s. But on a cool day in 1955, on the third floor of Build 20, known as the Plywood Palace, that would change. Minutes of a meeting at the Tech Model Railroad Club note “Mr. Eccles requests that anyone working or hacking on the electrical system turn the power off to avoid fuse blowing.” Maybe they were chopping parts of train tracks up. Maybe the term was derived from something altogether separate. But this was the beginning of a whole new culture. One that survives and thrives today. Hacking began to mean to do technical things for enjoyment in the club. And those who hacked became hackers. The OG hacker was Jack Dennis, an alumni of the TMRC. Jack Dennis had gotten his bachelors from MIT in 1953 and moved on to get his Masters then Doctorate by 1958, staying until he retired in 1987, teaching and influencing many subsequent generations of young hackers. You see, he studied artificial intelligence, or taking these computers built by companies like IBM to do math, and making them… intelligent. These switches and relays under the table of the model railroad were a lot of logical circuits strung together and in the days before what we think of as computers now, these were just a poor college student's way of building a computer. Having skipped two grades in high school, this “computer” was what drew Alan Kotok to the TMRC in 1958. And incoming freshman Peter Samson. And Bob Saunders, a bit older than the rest. Then grad student Jack Dennis introduced the TMRC to the IBM 704. A marvel of human engineering. It was like your dad's shiny new red 1958 corvette. Way too expensive to touch. But you just couldn't help it. The young hackers didn't know it yet, but Marvin Minsky had shown up to MIT in 1958. John McCarthy was a research fellow there. Jack Dennis got his PhD that year. Outside of MIT, Robert Noyce and Jack Kilby were giving us the Integrated Circuit, we got FORTRAN II, and that McCarthy guy. He gave us LISP. No, he didn't speak with a LISP. He spoke IN LISP. And then president Lyndon Johnson established ARPA in response to Sputnik, to speed up technological progress. Fernando Corbato got his PhD in physics in 1956 and stayed on with the nerds until he retired as well. Kotok ended up writing the first chess program with McCarthy on the IBM 7090 while still a teenager. Everything changed when Lincoln Lab got the TX-0, lovingly referred to as the tikso. Suddenly, they weren't loading cards into batch processing computers. The old IBM way was the enemy. The new machines allowed them to actually program. They wrote calculators and did work for courses. But Dennis kinda' let them do most anything they wanted. So of course we ended up with very early computer games as well, with tic tac toe and Mouse in the Maze. These kids would write anything. Compilers? Sure. Assemblers? Got it. They would hover around the signup sheet for access to the tikso and consume every minute that wasn't being used for official research. At this point, the kids were like the budding laser inventors in Weird Science. They were driven, crazed. And young Peter Deutsch joined them, writing the Lisp 1.5 implementation for the PDP at 12. Can you imagine being a 12 year old and holding your own around a group of some of the most influential people in the computer industry. Bill Gosper got to MIT in 1961 and so did the second PDP-1 ever built. Steve Russell joined the team and ended up working on Spacewar! When he wasn't working on Lisp. Speaking of video games. They made Spacewar during this time with a little help from Kotok Steve Piner, Samson, Suanders, and Dan Edwards. In fact, Kotok and Saunders created the first gamepad, later made popular for Nintendo, so they could play Spacewar without using the keyboard. This was work that would eventually be celebrated by the likes of Rolling Stone and Space War and in fact would later become the software used to smoke test the PDP once it entered into the buying tornado. Ricky Greenblatt got to MIT in 1962. And this unruly, unkempt, and extremely talented group of kids hacked their way through the PDP, with Greenblatt becoming famous for his hacks, hacking away the first FORTRAN compiler for the PDP and spending so much time at the terminal that he didn't make it through his junior year at MIT. These formative years in their lives were consumed with cocacola, Chinese food, and establishing many paradigms we now consider fundamental in computer science. The real shift from a batch process mode of operations, fed by paper tape and punchcards, to a interactive computer was upon us. And they were the pioneers who through countless hours of hacking away, found “the right thing.” Project MAC was established at MIT in 1963 using a DARPA grant and was initially run by legendary J. C. R. Licklider. MAC would influence operating systems with Multics which served as the inspiration for Unix, and the forming of what we now know as computer science through the 1960s and 70s. This represented a higher level of funding and a shift towards the era of development that led to the Internet and many of the standards we still use today. More generations of hackers would follow and continue to push the envelope. But that one special glimpse in time, let's just say if you listen at just the right frequency you can hear screaming at terminals when a game of Spacewar didn't go someone's way, or when something crashed, or with glee when you got “the right thing.” And if you listen hard enough at your next hackathon, you can sometimes hear a Kotok or a Deutsch or a Saunders whisper in your ear exactly what “the right thing” is - but only after sufficient amounts of trial, error, and Spacewar. This free exercise gives way to innovation. That's why Google famously gives employees free time to pursue their passions. That's why companies run hackathons. That's why everyone from DARPA to Netflix has run bounty programs. These young mathematicians, scientists, physicists, and engineers would go on to change the world in their own ways. Uncle John McCarthy would later move to Stanford, where he started the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. From there he influenced Sun Microsystems (the S in Sun is for Stanford), Cisco, and dozens of other Silicon Valley powerhouses. Dennis would go on to found Multics and be an inspiration for Ken Thompson with the first versions of Unix. And after retiring he would go to NASA and then Acorn Networks. Slug Russell would go on to a long career as a developer and then executive, including a stop mentoring two nerdy high school kids at Lakeside School in Seattle. They were Paul Allen and Bill Gates, who would go on to found Microsoft. Alan Kotok would go on to join DEC where he would work for 30 years, influencing much of the computing through the 70s and into the 80s. He would work on the Titan chip at DEC and in the various consortiums around the emergent Internet. He would be a founding member of the World Wide Web Consortium. Ricky Greenblatt ended up spending too much of his time hacking. He would go on to found Lisp Machines, coauthor the time sharing software for the PDP-6 and PDP-10, write Maclisp, and write the first computer chess program to beat world class players in Hubert Dreyfus. Peter Samson wrote the Tech Model Railroad Club's official dictionary which would evolve into the now-famous Jargon file. He wrote the Harmony compiler, a FORTRAN compiler for the PDP-6, made music for the first time with computers, became an architect at DEC, would oversee hardware engineering at NASA, and continues to act as a docent at the Computer History Museum. Bob Saunders would go on to be a professor at the University of California, becoming president of the IEEE, and Chairman of the Board during some of the most influential years in that great body of engineers and scientists. Peter Deutsch would go on to get his PhD from Berkeley, found Aladdin Enterprises, write Ghostscript, create free Postscript and PDF alternatives, work on Smalltalk, work at Sun, be an influential mind at Xerox PARC, and is now a composer. We owe a great deal to them. So thank you to these pioneers. And thank you, listeners, for sticking through to the end of this episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We're lucky to have you.
The Microchip Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us for the innovations of the future! Todays episode is on the history of the microchip, or microprocessor. This was a hard episode, because it was the culmination of so many technologies. You don't know where to stop telling the story - and you find yourself writing a chronological story in reverse chronological order. But few advancements have impacted humanity the way the introduction of the microprocessor has. Given that most technological advances are a convergence of otherwise disparate technologies, we'll start the story of the microchip with the obvious choice: the light bulb. Thomas Edison first demonstrated the carbon filament light bulb in 1879. William Joseph Hammer, an inventor working with Edison, then noted that if he added another electrode to a heated filament bulb that it would glow around the positive pole in the vacuum of the bulb and blacken the wire and the bulb around the negative pole. 25 years later, John Ambrose Fleming demonstrated that if that extra electrode is made more positive than the filament the current flows through the vacuum and that the current could only flow from the filament to the electrode and not the other direction. This converted AC signals to DC and represented a boolean gate. In the 1904 Fleming was granted Great Britain's patent number 24850 for the vacuum tube, ushering in the era of electronics. Over the next few decades, researchers continued to work with these tubes. Eccles and Jordan invented the flip-flop circuit at London's City and Guilds Technical College in 1918, receiving a patent for what they called the Eccles-Jordan Trigger Circuit in 1920. Now, English mathematician George Boole back in the earlier part of the 1800s had developed Boolean algebra. Here he created a system where logical statements could be made in mathematical terms. Those could then be performed using math on the symbols. Only a 0 or a 1 could be used. It took awhile, John Vincent Atanasoff and grad student Clifford Berry harnessed the circuits in the Atanasoff-Berry computer in 1938 at Iowa State University and using Boolean algebra, successfully solved linear equations but never finished the device due to World War II, when a number of other technological advancements happened, including the development of the ENIAC by John Mauchly and J Presper Eckert from the University of Pennsylvania, funded by the US Army Ordinance Corps, starting in 1943. By the time it was taken out of operation, the ENIAC had 20,000 of these tubes. Each digit in an algorithm required 36 tubes. Ten digit numbers could be multiplied at 357 per second, showing the first true use of a computer. John Von Neumann was the first to actually use the ENIAC when they used one million punch cards to run the computations that helped propel the development of the hydrogen bomb at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The creators would leave the University and found the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. Out of that later would come the Univac and the ancestor of todays Unisys Corporation. These early computers used vacuum tubes to replace gears that were in previous counting machines and represented the First Generation. But the tubes for the flip-flop circuits were expensive and had to be replaced way too often. The second generation of computers used transistors instead of vacuum tubes for logic circuits. The integrated circuit is basically a wire set into silicon or germanium that can be set to on or off based on the properties of the material. These replaced vacuum tubes in computers to provide the foundation of the boolean logic. You know, the zeros and ones that computers are famous for. As with most modern technologies the integrated circuit owes its origin to a number of different technologies that came before it was able to be useful in computers. This includes the three primary components of the circuit: the transistor, resistor, and capacitor. The silicon that chips are so famous for was actually discovered by Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius in 1824. He heated potassium chips in a silica container and washed away the residue and viola - an element! The transistor is a semiconducting device that has three connections that amplify data. One is the source, which is connected to the negative terminal on a battery. The second is the drain, and is a positive terminal that, when touched to the gate (the third connection), the transistor allows electricity through. Transistors then acts as an on/off switch. The fact they can be on or off is the foundation for Boolean logic in modern computing. The resistor controls the flow of electricity and is used to control the levels and terminate lines. An integrated circuit is also built using silicon but you print the pattern into the circuit using lithography rather than painstakingly putting little wires where they need to go like radio operators did with the Cats Whisker all those years ago. The idea of the transistor goes back to the mid-30s when William Shockley took the idea of a cat's wicker, or fine wire touching a galena crystal. The radio operator moved the wire to different parts of the crystal to pick up different radio signals. Solid state physics was born when Shockley, who first studied at Cal Tech and then got his PhD in Physics, started working on a way to make these useable in every day electronics. After a decade in the trenches, Bell gave him John Bardeen and Walter Brattain who successfully finished the invention in 1947. Shockley went on to design a new and better transistor, known as a bipolar transistor and helped move us from vacuum tubes, which were bulky and needed a lot of power, to first gernanium, which they used initially and then to silicon. Shockley got a Nobel Prize in physics for his work and was able to recruit a team of extremely talented young PhDs to help work on new semiconductor devices. He became increasingly frustrated with Bell and took a leave of absence. Shockley moved back to his hometown of Palo Alto, California and started a new company called the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. He had some ideas that were way before his time and wasn't exactly easy to work with. He pushed the chip industry forward but in the process spawned a mass exodus of employees that went to Fairchild in 1957. He called them the “Traitorous 8” to create what would be Fairchild Semiconductors. The alumni of Shockley Labs ended up spawning 65 companies over the next 20 years that laid foundation of the microchip industry to this day, including Intel. . If he were easier to work with, we might not have had the innovation that we've seen if not for Shockley's abbrasiveness! All of these silicon chip makers being in a small area of California then led to that area getting the Silicon Valley moniker, given all the chip makers located there. At this point, people were starting to experiment with computers using transistors instead of vacuum tubes. The University of Manchester created the Transistor Computer in 1953. The first fully transistorized computer came in 1955 with the Harwell CADET, MIT started work on the TX-0 in 1956, and the THOR guidance computer for ICBMs came in 1957. But the IBM 608 was the first commercial all-transistor solid-state computer. The RCA 501, Philco Transac S-1000, and IBM 7070 took us through the age of transistors which continued to get smaller and more compact. At this point, we were really just replacing tubes with transistors. But the integrated circuit would bring us into the third generation of computers. The integrated circuit is an electronic device that has all of the functional blocks put on the same piece of silicon. So the transistor, or multiple transistors, is printed into one block. Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments patented the first miniaturized electronic circuit in 1959, which used germanium and external wires and was really more of a hybrid integrated Circuit. Later in 1959, Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor invented the first truly monolithic integrated circuit, which he received a patent for. While doing so independently, they are considered the creators of the integrated circuit. The third generation of computers was from 1964 to 1971, and saw the introduction of metal-oxide-silicon and printing circuits with photolithography. In 1965 Gordon Moore, also of Fairchild at the time, observed that the number of transistors, resistors, diodes, capacitors, and other components that could be shoved into a chip was doubling about every year and published an article with this observation in Electronics Magazine, forecasting what's now known as Moore's Law. The integrated circuit gave us the DEC PDP and later the IBM S/360 series of computers, making computers smaller, and brought us into a world where we could write code in COBOL and FORTRAN. A microprocessor is one type of integrated circuit. They're also used in audio amplifiers, analog integrated circuits, clocks, interfaces, etc. But in the early 60s, the Minuteman missal program and the US Navy contracts were practically the only ones using these chips, at this point numbering in the hundreds, bringing us into the world of the MSI, or medium-scale integration chip. Moore and Noyce left Fairchild and founded NM Electronics in 1968, later renaming the company to Intel, short for Integrated Electronics. Federico Faggin came over in 1970 to lead the MCS-4 family of chips. These along with other chips that were economical to produce started to result in chips finding their way into various consumer products. In fact, the MCS-4 chips, which split RAM , ROM, CPU, and I/O, were designed for the Nippon Calculating Machine Corporation and Intel bought the rights back, announcing the chip in Electronic News with an article called “Announcing A New Era In Integrated Electronics.” Together, they built the Intel 4004, the first microprocessor that fit on a single chip. They buried the contacts in multiple layers and introduced 2-phase clocks. Silicon oxide was used to layer integrated circuits onto a single chip. Here, the microprocessor, or CPU, splits the arithmetic and logic unit, or ALU, the bus, the clock, the control unit, and registers up so each can do what they're good at, but live on the same chip. The 1st generation of the microprocessor was from 1971, when these 4-bit chips were mostly used in guidance systems. This boosted the speed by five times. The forming of Intel and the introduction of the 4004 chip can be seen as one of the primary events that propelled us into the evolution of the microprocessor and the fourth generation of computers, which lasted from 1972 to 2010. The Intel 4004 had 2,300 transistors. The Intel 4040 came in 1974, giving us 3,000 transistors. It was still a 4-bit data bus but jumped to 12-bit ROM. The architecture was also from Faggin but the design was carried out by Tom Innes. We were firmly in the era of LSI, or Large Scale Integration chips. These chips were also used in the Busicom calculator, and even in the first pinball game controlled by a microprocessor. But getting a true computer to fit on a chip, or a modern CPU, remained an elusive goal. Texas Instruments ran an ad in Electronics with a caption that the 8008 was a “CPU on a Chip” and attempted to patent the chip, but couldn't make it work. Faggin went to Intel and they did actually make it work, giving us the first 8-bit microprocessor. It was then redesigned in 1972 as the 8080. A year later, the chip was fabricated and then put on the market in 1972. Intel made the R&D money back in 5 months and sparked the idea for Ed Roberts to build The Altair 8800. Motorola and Zilog brought competition in the 6900 and Z-80, which was used in the Tandy TRS-80, one of the first mass produced computers. N-MOSs transistors on chips allowed for new and faster paths and MOS Technology soon joined the fray with the 6501 and 6502 chips in 1975. The 6502 ended up being the chip used in the Apple I, Apple II, NES, Atari 2600, BBC Micro, Commodore PET and Commodore VIC-20. The MOS 6510 variant was then used in the Commodore 64. The 8086 was released in 1978 with 3,000 transistors and marked the transition to Intel's x86 line of chips, setting what would become the standard in future chips. But the IBM wasn't the only place you could find chips. The Motorola 68000 was used in the Sun-1 from Sun Microsystems, the HP 9000, the DEC VAXstation, the Comodore Amiga, the Apple Lisa, the Sinclair QL, the Sega Genesis, and the Mac. The chips were also used in the first HP LaserJet and the Apple LaserWriter and used in a number of embedded systems for years to come. As we rounded the corner into the 80s it was clear that the computer revolution was upon us. A number of computer companies were looking to do more than what they could do with he existing Intel, MOS, and Motorola chips. And ARPA was pushing the boundaries yet again. Carver Mead of Caltech and Lynn Conway of Xerox PARC saw the density of transistors in chips starting to plateau. So with DARPA funding they went out looking for ways to push the world into the VLSI era, or Very Large Scale Integration. The VLSI project resulted in the concept of fabless design houses, such as Broadcom, 32-bit graphics, BSD Unix, and RISC processors, or Reduced Instruction Set Computer Processor. Out of the RISC work done at UC Berkely came a number of new options for chips as well. One of these designers, Acorn Computers evaluated a number of chips and decided to develop their own, using VLSI Technology, a company founded by more Fairchild Semiconductor alumni) to manufacture the chip in their foundry. Sophie Wilson, then Roger, worked on an instruction set for the RISC. Out of this came the Acorn RISC Machine, or ARM chip. Over 100 billion ARM processors have been produced, well over 10 for every human on the planet. You know that fancy new A13 that Apple announced. It uses a licensed ARM core. Another chip that came out of the RISC family was the SUN Sparc. Sun being short for Stanford University Network, co-founder Andy Bchtolsheim, they were close to the action and released the SPARC in 1986. I still have a SPARC 20 I use for this and that at home. Not that SPARC has gone anywhere. They're just made by Oracle now. The Intel 80386 chip was a 32 bit microprocessor released in 1985. The first chip had 275,000 transistors, taking plenty of pages from the lessons learned in the VLSI projects. Compaq built a machine on it, but really the IBM PC/AT made it an accepted standard, although this was the beginning of the end of IBMs hold on the burgeoning computer industry. And AMD, yet another company founded by Fairchild defectors, created the Am386 in 1991, ending Intel's nearly 5 year monopoly on the PC clone industry and ending an era where AMD was a second source of Intel parts but instead was competing with Intel directly. We can thank AMD's aggressive competition with Intel for helping to keep the CPU industry going along Moore's law! At this point transistors were only 1.5 microns in size. Much, much smaller than a cats whisker. The Intel 80486 came in 1989 and again tracking against Moore's Law we hit the first 1 million transistor chip. Remember how Compaq helped end IBM's hold on the PC market? When the Intel 486 came along they went with AMD. This chip was also important because we got L1 caches, meaning that chips didn't need to send instructions to other parts of the motherboard but could do caching internally. From then on, the L1 and later L2 caches would be listed on all chips. We'd finally broken 100MHz! Motorola released the 68050 in 1990, hitting 1.2 Million transistors, and giving Apple the chip that would define the Quadra and also that L1 cache. The DEC Alpha came along in 1992, also a RISC chip, but really kicking off the 64-bit era. While the most technically advanced chip of the day, it never took off and after DEC was acquired by Compaq and Compaq by HP, the IP for the Alpha was sold to Intel in 2001, with the PC industry having just decided they could have all their money. But back to the 90s, ‘cause life was better back when grunge was new. At this point, hobbyists knew what the CPU was but most normal people didn't. The concept that there was a whole Univac on one of these never occurred to most people. But then came the Pentium. Turns out that giving a chip a name and some marketing dollars not only made Intel a household name but solidified their hold on the chip market for decades to come. While the Intel Inside campaign started in 1991, after the Pentium was released in 1993, the case of most computers would have a sticker that said Intel Inside. Intel really one upped everyone. The first Pentium, the P5 or 586 or 80501 had 3.1 million transistors that were 16.7 micrometers. Computers kept getting smaller and cheaper and faster. Apple answered by moving to the PowerPC chip from IBM, which owed much of its design to the RISC. Exactly 10 years after the famous 1984 Super Bowl Commercial, Apple was using a CPU from IBM. Another advance came in 1996 when IBM developed the Power4 chip and gave the world multi-core processors, or a CPU that had multiple CPU cores inside the CPU. Once parallel processing caught up to being able to have processes that consumed the resources on all those cores, we saw Intel's Pentium D, and AMD's Athlon 64 x2 released in May 2005 bringing multi-core architecture to the consumer. This led to even more parallel processing and an explosion in the number of cores helped us continue on with Moore's Law. There are now custom chips that reach into the thousands of cores today, although most laptops have maybe 4 cores in them. Setting multi-core architectures aside for a moment, back to Y2K when Justin Timberlake was still a part of NSYNC. Then came the Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Celeron, Pentium III, Xeon, Pentium M, Xeon LV, Pentium 4. On the IBM/Apple side, we got the G3 with 6.3 million transistors, G4 with 10.5 million transistors, and the G5 with 58 million transistors and 1,131 feet of copper interconnects, running at 3GHz in 2002 - so much copper that NSYNC broke up that year. The Pentium 4 that year ran at 2.4 GHz and sported 50 million transistors. This is about 1 transistor per dollar made off Star Trek: Nemesis in 2002. I guess Attack of the Clones was better because it grossed over 300 Million that year. Remember how we broke the million transistor mark in 1989? In 2005, Intel started testing Montecito with certain customers. The Titanium-2 64-bit CPU with 1.72 billion transistors, shattering the billion mark and hitting a billion two years earlier than projected. Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced Apple would be moving to the Intel processor that year. NeXTSTEP had been happy as a clam on Intel, SPARC or HP RISC so given the rapid advancements from Intel, this seemed like a safe bet and allowed Apple to tell directors in IT departments “see, we play nice now.” And the innovations kept flowing for the next decade and a half. We packed more transistors in, more cache, cleaner clean rooms, faster bus speeds, with Intel owning the computer CPU market and AMD slowly growing from the ashes of Acorn computer into the power-house that AMD cores are today, when embedded in other chips designs. I'd say not much interesting has happened, but it's ALL interesting, except the numbers just sound stupid they're so big. And we had more advances along the way of course, but it started to feel like we were just miniaturizing more and more, allowing us to do much more advanced computing in general. The fifth generation of computing is all about technologies that we today consider advanced. Artificial Intelligence, Parallel Computing, Very High Level Computer Languages, the migration away from desktops to laptops and even smaller devices like smartphones. ULSI, or Ultra Large Scale Integration chips not only tells us that chip designers really have no creativity outside of chip architecture, but also means millions up to tens of billions of transistors on silicon. At the time of this recording, the AMD Epic Rome is the single chip package with the most transistors, at 32 billion. Silicon is the seventh most abundant element in the universe and the second most in the crust of the planet earth. Given that there's more chips than people by a huge percentage, we're lucky we don't have to worry about running out any time soon! We skipped RAM in this episode. But it kinda' deserves its own, since RAM is still following Moore's Law, while the CPU is kinda' lagging again. Maybe it's time for our friends at DARPA to get the kids from Berkley working at VERYUltra Large Scale chips or VULSIs! Or they could sign on to sponsor this podcast! And now I'm going to go take a VERYUltra Large Scale nap. Gentle listeners I hope you can do that as well. Unless you're driving while listening to this. Don't nap while driving. But do have a lovely day. Thank you for listening to yet another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We're so lucky to have you!
O Dentro do Ringue é um podcast da Vindi (vindi.com.br). Sobre cultura, startups e tecnologia. Cumprir metas sempre é um exercício de gestão. Convidamos o Millor Machado (especialista em cultura de gestão) e o Pablo Silva (estudioso de metodologias ágeis) para um papo sobre metas, métricas e dores de gestão. Ouça nas plataformas: Spotify; Google Podcasts; iTunes; Deezer; TunelIn. Episódio #1 - Metas e métricas Host: Rodrigo Dantas, CEO da Vindi LinkedIn; Instagram; Twitter. Millor Machado - Formado em Engenharia pela Unicamp, Millor é referência em estudos sobre gestão e metas, Millor fundou o Empreendemia (rede social corporativa para PMEs do país), liderou times na Fundação Estudar, HSM até fundar o GPS de Gestão. LinkedIn; Pablo Silva - Formado pela Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto, Pablo é membro da Agile Alliance. Engenheiro de software de formação, liderou times na Locaweb e hoje é o Head e Produtos da Vindi. LinkedIn; Instagram; Twitter. OKR começou com a Intel e com Andy Grove. Em 1968, dois amigos fundaram a NM Eletronics, na California. A NM tinham esse nome por causa do sobrenome dos fundadores: o físico Robert Noyce e o químico Gordon Moore. Eles trabalhavam juntos na Fairchild Semicondutor e decidiram largar tudo para montar um projeto para desenvolver e fabricar semicondutores. A primeira curiosidade dessa história é que o Moore, da NM, foi o autor da Lei de Moore. Mas não vamo falar sobre essa lei nessa história de hoje. A empresa recém criada pela dupla, encontrou um nome melhor, depois que uma rede hoteleira, a Intelco, liberou o nome para os dois novos empreendedores. Nascia aí a Integrated Eletronics, a Intel. Embora os fundadores tenham tido uma contribuição grande para a tecnologia, o nome mais emblemático da história da Intel foi András Gróf. Hungaro, e fugitivo da segunda guerra mundial, foi o número 3 e se tornou o diretor de engenharia da empresa (a convite de Moore) e escreveu na história, um dos capítulos mais importantes sobre gestão do mundo. Outra curiosidade: András mudou o nome para Andrew Grove, depois que se situou nos Estados Unidos. Andy, como era chamado, é o ponto central dessa pequena história aqui, porque é o provavelmente o “pai da gestão moderna”. Nos bastidores da Intel, algumas pessoas diziam que o Andy era paranóico com métricas e acompanhamento de metas. Essa chamada paranóia, o levou a presidente do grupo. Andy lançou dois livros importantes sobre gestão: High Output Management de 1983 que ilustrou pela primeira vez o termo OKRs (objective and key results) e Só os paranóicos sobrevivem, de 1996. As duas principais teses dos livros é que gestão é um exercício de método. E que feedbacks um-a-um (os famosos one-a-one), medir o que realmente importa, definir padrões para acompanhar métricas e incentivar os resultados por equipes, foram algumas das principais influências que Andy trouxe para uma nova forma de gestão. OKRs, do inglês objective and key results (objetivos e resultados chave) é uma metodologia para gestão muito usada por empresas de tecnologia no mundo. Nos 11 anos em que esteve à frente da presidência da Intel, ele levou a empresa de U$2 bilhões para U$26 bilhões de faturamento. No último dia de empresa, Andy deixou o cargo e a liderança, com a Intel valendo U$198 bilhões de dólares. O mais legal dessa história é que empresas tentam mudar a cultura de gestão falando de OKRs, de metodologia ágil como se fosse algo novo, inventado pelas empresas da nova geração. “ah o Google foi de 40 pessoas para 60 mil pessoas usando a metodologia de OKRs”, o Spotify usou o formato de Squads e mudou a forma de desenvolver o software”... Se datarmos o termo “OKR” com o livro de Andy, temos uma sistema de acompanhamento de métricas de mais de 30 anos, que ainda funciona. Ou que pelo menos deveria funcionar. Livros do Andy Grove High Output Management; Só os paranoicos sobrevivem.
Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us for the innovations of the future! Todays episode is on the History of chip-maker Broadcom. This is actually two stories. The first starts with a movement called fabless semiconductors. LSI had been part of Control Data Corporation and spun off to make chips. Kickstarted by LSI in the late sixties and early seventies, fabless companies started popping up. These would have what are known as foundries make their chips. The foundries didn't compete with the organizations they were making chips for. This allowed the chip designers to patent, design, and sell chips without having to wield large manufacturing operations. Such was the state of the semiconductor industry when Henry Nicholas met Dr Henry Samueli while working at TRW in the 1980s. Samueli had picked up an interest in electronics early on, while building an AM/FM radio in school. By the 80s he was a professor at UCLA and teamed up with Nicholas, who was a student as well, to form Broadcom in 1991. They began designing integrated circuit (also referred to as a microchip). These are electronic circuits on a small flat piece (or "chip") of semiconductor material, usually silicon. Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce had been pioneers in the field in the late 50s and early 60s and by the 80s, there were lots and lots of little transistors in there and people like our two Henry's were fascinated with how to shove as many transistors into as small a chip as possible. So the two decided to leave academia and go for it. They founded Broadcom Corporation, Henry Nicholas' wife made them a logo and they started selling their chips. They made chips for power management, memory controllers, control units, and early mobile devices. But most importantly, they made chips for wi-fi. Today, their chips provide the chips for most every Apple device sold. They also make chips for use in network switches, are responsible for the raspberry pi and more. Samueli holds over 70 patents on his own, although in-all Broadcom has over 20,000, many in mobile, internet of things, and data center! By 1998 sales were good and Broadcom went public. In 2000, UCLA renamed the school of engineering to the Henry Samueli School of Engineering. Nicholas retired from Broadcom in 2003, Samueli bought the Anaheim Ducks in 2005. They continued to grow, make chips, and by 2009 they hit the Fortune 500 list. They were purchased by Avago Technologies in 2016. Samueli became the Chief Technology officer of the new combined company. Wait, who's Avago?!?! Avago started in 1961 as the semiconductor division of Hewlett-Packard. In the 60s they were pioneers in using LEDs in displays. They moved into fiber in the 70s and semiconductors by the 90s, giving the world the optical mouse and cable modems along the way. They spun out of HP in 99 as part of Agilent and then were acquired from there to become Avago in 2005, naming Hock Tan as CEO. The numbers were staggering. Not only did they ship over a billion optical mouse chips, but they also pushed the boudoirs of radio frequency chips, enabling industries like ATMs and cash registers but also gave us IR on computers as a common pre-bluetooth way of wirelessly connecting peripherals. They were also key in innovations giving us wifi+bluetooth+fm combo chips for phones, pushing past the 100Gbps transfer speeds for optical and doing innovative work with touch screens. Their 20,000 patents combined with the Broadcom patents give them over 40,000 patents in just those companies. They went public in 2009 and got pretty good at increasing revenue and margins concurrently. By 2016 they went out and purchased Broadcom for $37 Billion. They helped Broadcom diversify the business and kept the name. They bought Brocade for $5.9B in 2017 and CA for $18.9 billion in 2018. Buying Symantec in 2019 bumps the revenue of Broadcom up from $2.5 billion to 24.6 billion and EBITDA margins from 33 percent to 56 percent. The aggressive acquisitions caught the eyes of Donald Trump who shut down a $117 billion dollar attempted takeover of Qualcomm, a rival of both the old Broadcom and the new Broadcom. Broadcom makes the Trident+ chips, the network interface controllers used in Dell PowerEdge blade servers, the systems on a chip used in the raspberry pi, the wifi chipsets used in the Nexus, the wifi + bluethooth chips used in every iPhone since the iPhone 3GS, the Jericho chip, the tomahawk chip. They employ some of the best chip designers of the day, including Sophie Wilson who designed the instruction set for an early RISC processor and designed the ARM chip in the 80s when she was at Acorn. Ultimately cash is cheap these days. Broadcom CEO Hock Tan has proven he can raise and deploy capital quickly. Mostly building on past successes in go-to-market infrastructure. But, if you remember from our previous episode on the history of Symantec, that's exactly what Symantec had been doing when they became a portfolio company! But here's the thing. If you acquire companies and your EBITDA drops, you're stuck. You have to increase revenues and reduce EBITDA. If you can do that in Mergers and Acquisitions, investors are likely to allow you to build as big a company as you want! With or without a unified strategy. But the recent woes of GE should be a warning. As you grow, you have to retool your approach. Otherwise, the layers upon layers of management begin to eat away at those profits. But you dig too far into that and quality suffers, as Symantec learned with their merger and then demerger with Veritas. Think about this. CA is strong in Identity and Access Management, with 1,500 patents. Symantec is strong in endpoint, web, and DLP security, with 3,600 patents. Brocade has over 900 in switching and fiber in the data center. The full device trust and reporting could, if done properly go from the user to the agent on a device to the data center and then down to the chip in a full zero trust model. Or Broadcom could just be a holding company, sitting on around 50,000 patents and eeking out profit where they can. Only time will tell. But the lesson to learn from the history of both of these companies is that if you're innovating, increasing revenues and reducing EBITDA, you too can have tens of billions of dollars, because you've proven to be a great investment.
Le monde entier connaît Steve Jobs ou Bill Gates, mais qui se souvient de Frederick Terman, Robert Noyce, Jim McCarthy ou Stewart Brand ? Ce sont pourtant les vrais héros, les protagonistes majeurs de l’histoire de la Silicon Valley. Une histoire politique et idéologique qui fait l’objet d’un livre, sobrement intitulé The Valley, une histoire politique de la Silicon Valley, écrit par le journaliste Fabien Benoît. L'enquête intellectuelle explore les lieux et les personnages qui ont façonné ce qu’on pourrait qualifier d’esprit et de pensée de la Silicon Valley. Elle retrace un siècle d’histoire en donnant la parole à ses acteurs, français expatriés, entrepreneurs historiques, journalistes et historiens, tous acteurs et experts de cette « capitale technologique mondiale » qui abrite aujourd’hui 12 000 entreprises high-tech et 3 millions d’habitants.
I 1959 sad Robert Noyce, der stod i spidsen for Fairchild Semiconductors, til et kedeligt møde hos sin patentadvokat.Efter mødet tog Noyce hjem og skrev i sin notesbog: "Det ville være formålsstjenstligt hvis vi kunne kombinere flere enheder på ét stykke silicium". Altså den moderne mikrochip. Bare som skriblerier i en notesbog anno 1959 - samme år som halefinner bliver det helt store på biler.Spol frem til 1968 var den utålmodige Robert Noyce parat til at forlade Fairchild-selskabet – denne gang sammen med den mere milde Moore. De ville starte deres eget firma – og det tog dem blot to dage at finde finansieringen.Så var der bare det med navnet. Det tog næsten længere tid. Men til sidst fandt de på Integrated Electronics Corp. Det, som du i dag bedre kender under navnet Intel.Helt så længe har dagens gæst i Tech fra toppen, Joachim Ærtebjerg, ikke været med – men tæt på. For Joachim har arbejdet for Intel siden de lancerede Pentium-processoren i midten af 90´erne.I dag sidder Joachim som CTO for EMEA-området Intel og i denne episode deler han sin viden og indsigt. I episoden kommer vi blandt andet ind over:- Et indblik Intels skifte fra processorer til at supplere med udvikling inden for SSD-diske, NAND-kredsløb og den nye Optane-lagringsteknologi der har samme latency som RAM- Hvordan udviklingen inden for it er noget mindre planlagt end folk tror - og hvordan firmaer som Intel også eksperimenterer og forsøger sig frem med nye produkter- Hvordan Intel laver specielle processorer til store kunder, som har brug for ekstraordinært mange bestemte processorer til deres datacentre- Intels rolle i skifte fra de traditionelle PC´ere i 1990´erne til moderne bærbare, servere, mobiltelefoner - der alle sammen indeholder processorer, modems og controllere
I 1959 sad Robert Noyce, der stod i spidsen for Fairchild Semiconductors, til et kedeligt møde hos sin patentadvokat.Efter mødet tog Noyce hjem og skrev i sin notesbog: "Det ville være formålsstjenstligt hvis vi kunne kombinere flere enheder på ét stykke silicium". Altså den moderne mikrochip. Bare som skriblerier i en notesbog anno 1959 - samme år som halefinner bliver det helt store på biler.Spol frem til 1968 var den utålmodige Robert Noyce parat til at forlade Fairchild-selskabet – denne gang sammen med den mere milde Moore. De ville starte deres eget firma – og det tog dem blot to dage at finde finansieringen.Så var der bare det med navnet. Det tog næsten længere tid. Men til sidst fandt de på Integrated Electronics Corp. Det, som du i dag bedre kender under navnet Intel.Helt så længe har dagens gæst i Tech fra toppen, Joachim Ærtebjerg, ikke været med – men tæt på. For Joachim har arbejdet for Intel siden de lancerede Pentium-processoren i midten af 90´erne.I dag sidder Joachim som CTO for EMEA-området Intel og i denne episode deler han sin viden og indsigt. I episoden kommer vi blandt andet ind over:- Et indblik Intels skifte fra processorer til at supplere med udvikling inden for SSD-diske, NAND-kredsløb og den nye Optane-lagringsteknologi der har samme latency som RAM- Hvordan udviklingen inden for it er noget mindre planlagt end folk tror - og hvordan firmaer som Intel også eksperimenterer og forsøger sig frem med nye produkter- Hvordan Intel laver specielle processorer til store kunder, som har brug for ekstraordinært mange bestemte processorer til deres datacentre- Intels rolle i skifte fra de traditionelle PC´ere i 1990´erne til moderne bærbare, servere, mobiltelefoner - der alle sammen indeholder processorer, modems og controllere
Leslie Berlin wrote the book on Silicon Valley. The Project Historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford, she has profiled microchip discoverer Robert Noyce, and her book "Troublemakers," about Silicon Valley in the 1970s, has been called a “landmark event.” Berlin takes us back to the ’70s, when Ronald Reagan referred to those in the valley as “pioneers of tomorrow." She still sees the region today as “the golden child of the Golden State.”
When we talk about the broad swath of technology and its progenitors in Silicon Valley rarely are we talking about great breakthroughs. A new app for dating or dog walking, the one-hundredth messaging app or new forms of enterprise collaboration are hardly the stuff of Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates or Mitch Kapor or Robert Noyce or Bill Hewlett. But every once in a while there is a new new thing that really matters. Like the PC or the smartphone or Microsoft Word and Excell. For years, many thought something called Virtual Reality might be that thing. What was not know is that it would take a 19-year-old dreamer, one of odder character in a world that celebrates oddness, to make it a reality. The fact that Mark Zuckerberg the man that the European Union just called a “technology gangster,” would co-opt it and screw it up, only adds to an important chapter of legends of Silicon Valley. Like other legends, this one is told by Blake Harris in The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality My conversation with Blake Harris
About the Lecture: Mr. Maibach will share 10 lively stories of ethics, strategy and decision-making drawn from his 18 years as Vice President of Global Government Affairs at the Intel Corporation. These stories sometimes involve the first four CEOs of Intel – Dr. Robert Noyce, Dr. Gordon Moore, Dr. Andrew Grove, and Dr. Craig Barrett. These are three of the four founders of the company. Dr. Noyce is the co-inventor of the integrated circuit (computer chip). Dr. Moore is famous for “Moore's Law.” Dr. Grove was Time Man of the Year in 1997. Dr. Barrett is a former professor at Stanford University. All four are men of exceptional intelligence and high integrity. Inside each story is a “lesson” or a “moral to the story.” At the end of the talk, Mr. Maibach will explore with our audience what some of those lessons were and remain today. About the Speaker: Michael Maibach is a seasoned professional in global business diplomacy, advisor to several non-profits, and a Fellow of the International Academy of Management. While in college he was elected to the DeKalb County Board (Illinois), the first person elected to public office under 21 years of age in US history. He is currently a Senior Fellow in American Federalism at the American Opportunity Foundation, and a Trustee and Managing Director at the James Wilson Institute. From 2003-12, he served as the President and CEO of the European-American Business Council. He was Vice President, Global Government Affairs at Intel Corporation from 1983-2001. He has served as an advisor to two White House Commissions under Presidents Reagan and Bush Sr. and served on two US State Department advisory councils. He has testified before the US Congress on 17 occasions. He is a graduate of The Institute of World Politics, and also holds M.A. degrees from Georgetown University and Northern Illinois University.
Norman Borlaug and Robert Noyce aren't household names. But these two Iowans influenced the 20th century more than anyone else on Planet Earth. Borlaug created drought and disease-resistant varieties of wheat that thrived in poor soils throughout the planet. Because of him, billions in the developing world avoided starvation (they probably only missed it by about a decade). Noyce invented the integrated circuit and founded Intel. He is the father of Silicon Valley, the digital revolution, and the Internet economy that connects the world.Both men owe their success to their farm roots in Iowa.
In this 29-minute episode, David Laws recounts the history and background of the "Fairchild Eight" and their Notebooks, what makes them so special technologically and the personalities of each one (min. 6). David then talks about the equivalent today (min. 14), its complete analog beginnings and the memory challenge (min. 16) and closes with how the Computer History Museum acquired the notebooks. Although not household names, the work of Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and the other six continues to have an enormous impact on all of us every day. Feed your soul. Keep listening.
How did the co-founders of Intel go from being "traitors" to two of the early pioneers of silicon valley? We learn about Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://news.iheart.com/podcast-advertisers
What I learned from reading The Intel Trinity: How Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove Built the World's Most Important Company by Michael Malone.
What I learned from reading The Intel Trinity: How Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove Built the World's Most Important Company by Michael Malone.If you want to listen to the full episode you’ll need to upgrade to the Misfit feed. You will get access to every full episode. These episodes are available nowhere else.As a bonus you will also get lifetime access to my notebook that contains key insights from over 285 podcasts and lectures on entrepreneurship.The Misfit Feed has no ads, no intro music, no interviews, no fluff. Just ideas from some of the greatest entrepreneurial minds in history. Upgrade now.
A meeting of two American masters: Robert Noyce and Tom Wolfe.
A meeting of two American masters: Robert Noyce and Tom Wolfe.
Meet Scott S. Smith Contributing columnist for Investors Business Daily discussing his articles and interviews about: Pat Boone: singer, actor, & philanthropist Joseph Pulitzer: newspaper founder & The Pulitzer Prize Fred Tudor: inventor of the ice machine Robert Noyce: inventor of computer microchip The brilliant Scott S. Smith is the author of God Reconsidered and Extraordinary People www.godreconsidered.com www,extraordinarypeople.comThis show is broadcast live on W4CY Radio – (www.w4cy.com) part of Talk 4 Radio (http://www.talk4radio.com/) on the Talk 4 Media Network (http://www.talk4media.com/).
Fiveofthebest.podomatic.com The Munich air disaster occurred on 6 February 1958, when British European AirwaysFlight 609 crashed on its third attempt to take off from a slush-covered runway atMunich-Riem Airport in Munich, West Germany. On board the plane was theManchester United football team, nicknamed the "Busby Babes", along with a number of supporters and journalists.[1] Twenty of the 44 people on board the aircraft died in the crash The new wing design was extremely thin, with a thickness-to-chord ratio of only 3.36% and an aspect ratio of 2.45. The wing's leading-edges were so thin (0.016 in/0.41 mm) and sharp that they presented a hazard to ground crews, and protective guards had to be installed during ground operations. The safety record of the F-104 Starfighter became high-profile news, especially in Germany, in the mid-1960s. In West Germany it came to be nicknamed Witwenmacher ("The Widowmaker"). Some operators lost a large proportion of their aircraft through accidents, although the accident rate varied widely depending on the user and operating conditions; the German Air Force lost about 30% of aircraft in accidents over its operating career,[38] and Canada lost over 50% of its F-104s.[39] The Spanish Air Force, however, lost none.[40][41] 15,000 metres (49,000 ft) in 131.1 seconds 20,000 metres (66,000 ft) in 222.99 seconds 25,000 metres (82,000 ft) in 266.03 seconds Zenith engineer, Eugene Polley created the "Flash-matic" the first wireless TV remote in 1955. The Flash-matic operated by means of four photocells, one in each corner of the TV screen. The viewer used a directional flashlight to activate the four control functions, which turned the picture and sound on and off, and turned the channel tuner dial clockwise and counter-clockwise. By definition the integrated circuit aka microchip is a set of interconnected electronic components such as transistors and resistors, that are etched or imprinted on a onto a tiny chip of a semiconducting material, such as silicon or germanium. Jack Kilby, an engineer with a background in ceramic-based silk screen circuit boards and transistor-based hearing aids, started working for Texas Instrumentsin 1958. A year earlier, research engineer Robert Noyce had co-founded the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation. From 1958 to 1959, both electrical engineers were working on an answer to the same dilemma: how to make more of less. jack kilby's first integrated curcuit The traitorous eight are eight men who left Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in 1957, due to a conflict withWilliam Shockley, to form Fairchild Semiconductor. Fairchild Bill robert noyce 15 min video about traitorous eight http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLNh4UY5ohw In 1958 and 1961, the American Air Force lost nuclear weapons over the skies of South and North Carolina, respectively, raining potential apocalypse on the folks below. In both incidents, complete catastrophe was avoided thanks to that ever-potent combination of foresight and unmitigated dumb luck. And in the former incident, the bomb fell square on some unsuspecting children's playhouse. Unlike the 1958 mishap, the Goldsboro crash could have had dire consequences for the Tar Heel State. As the bombs' deactivator Dr. Jack Revelle later admitted, "How close was it to exploding? My opinion is damn close. In 1957, a B-36 accidentally salvoed a hydrogen bomb though it's bay doors while on approach to Kirtland AFB. The core was installed but didn't detonate, the conventional explosives did set off, scattering radioactive debris over a large swath of scrub land. In the early 90's the area was still restricted due to radiation concerns.