The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce (1983)
esquire.com
esquire.com
In his last interview, Noyce was asked what he would do if he were "emperor" of the United States. He said that he would, among other things, "…make sure we are preparing our next generation to flourish in a high-tech age. And that means education of the lowest and the poorest, as well as at the graduate school level."
Plus, to amplify that, there are a lot more software hackers here than hardware hackers.
When Noyce died in 1990, the computer revolution had only barely crawled out of the cave. Silicon Valley and the US were in a recession; SV's financial might and reach was tiny compared to what it is today. It was only in the late 1980s that computer sales finally took off, global PC shipments were ~9 million in 1987, ~20 million by 1990, and 100 million by 1998.
Look at the tech industry in, say, 1988:
Microsoft $590m in sales. Intel $2.8b in sales. Apple was at $4b in sales. Those were three of the giants, and all of those figures were huge increases over just a few years prior.
GM's sales by comparison in 1988, were $110 billion. The tech industry was tiny 30 years ago.
On a side note, the 1988 Intel annual report opens with a very neat 20 year anniversary walk-through of their technology history:
https://www.intel.com/content/dam/doc/report/history-1988-an...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8133479 has a few, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14650795 has a good one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HW5Fvk8FNOQ
Anyway it features Robert Noyce at around 9 mins 20 secs in.
Edit: Thanks guiambros for pointing out the stupid region restriction. This link should work for people outside the UK: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x64ng4h
Anyone having the same problem? (I'm in NY)
EDIT: ok, I got it. This is from BBC, so likely only available in the UK. I found a copy on their site [1], and the player is more explicit - "BBC iPlayer only works in the UK. Sorry, it’s due to rights issues." Need to watch through VPN...
EDIT 2: Here's one that works [2], without VPN.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p01z4rrj/horizon-19771...
[2] https://archive.org/details/BBCHorizon19771978NowTheChipsAre...
'MX','GY','CL','BO','VE','PY','EC','CO','US','CA','UY','BR','PE','GF','AR'
No idea why those, but that's their policy in YouTube
Plus ça change
edit: oh wow, more of the same:
> Such chips will totally revolutionarize our way of life, they are the reason why Japan is abandoning its ship building, and why our children will grow up without jobs to go to
Looking at economic trends of the past 100 or so years, there is marked change beginning in the late 70s, especially in various forms of equality. Using automation alone for explaining that would be a folly, but equally folly would be to say that automation has had no economic effect.
> It's interesting to me to see what an enormous amount of publicity the microchip has gotten recently including that article of Tom Wolfe's. Incidentally, on that article of Tom Wolfe's, I do want to point out that Tom Wolfe is first of all a novelist. And only secondarily is he a historian but everything that appears in print of course is true as you've all learned. Particularly if you ever read something that you know something about.
* Shockley was ahead of his time with peer-ranking and transparent salaries
* Ageism and zero work-life balance has been a feature of the Silicon Valley landscape since its inception
* In the 1950's, the reference point for what a youthful, technically innovative, highly entrepreneurial industry would look like was the automobile industry - which would not at all be obvious to a modern reader who didn't know the early history of automobiles (I know the piece was written in the 80's, but for that part Wolfe is taking the perspective of someone in the burgeoning Silicon Valley of the 50's-60s)