Santa Clara Valley Historical Association

The Moon, Microprocessors, and Gene Manipulation

"That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind," said astronaut Neil Armstrong as he set foot on the Moon. This great U.S. achievement in 1969 -- thanks in considerable measure to theoretical work, flight simulation, and other NASA/Ames research -- demonstrated America's recovery of the aerospace initiative. As the '70s unfolded, NASA/Ames guided the second and third Pioneer series explorations of the outer reaches of the solar system.

Meanwhile, the art of packing more and more circuitry onto a fingernail-size silicon chip steadily grew more amazing. When Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore founded Intel Corporation in 1968 (and Arthur Rock raised $5 million in start-up capital for them in 30 minutes on the telephone), they decided to focus on a little-contested part of the market: memory. In 1969 they were producing an 1101 256-bit static RAM (random access memory) for 21 cents per bit. By 1993, that price had been reduced to $.0000029 per bit in an 8-megabit flash chip -- just one of Intel's many successes. The phenomenon of ever denser circuits at ever dwindling cost gained expression as "Moore's Law:" memory capacity will double every year, and cost will drop by 20 to 30%.

In 1971, Marcian (Ted) Hoff, still fresh from postgraduate work at Stanford, conceived the microprocessor at Intel, and a talented Italian-born physicist, Federico Faggin, carried through with its development. Hoff's four-chip set, centered around one general-purpose logic device that would access its application instructions from semiconductor memory, replaced 12 custom chips in a programmable calculator -- and could be adapted by programs to perform in many different applications. It packed as much computing power as the first electronic computer, the ENIAC, which filled a warehouse when it was built in 1946.

Xerox Corporation opened its Palo Alto Research Center in 1970. In ensuing years, PARC scientists developed a dozen groundbreaking computer technologies, some of them growing out of Douglas Englebart's original ideas at Stanford Research Institute. These included portable computing, the laser printer, the first easy-to-use word processing program, and desktop publishing's Postscript language. Other companies -- notably Hewlett-Packard, Apple Computer, and Adobe Systems -- later exploited most of these innovations.

Semiconductor companies and production had zoomed so much that in 1971 Don Hoefler, editor of Microelectronics News, coined the name "Silicon Valley" as shorthand for the whole nexus of wondrous electronics products, instant millionaires, and brand-new industries. Hoefler also traced the history of semiconductor industry spinouts, pegging Fairchild as the most significant and adding, "Fairchild itself has spawned many firms, in instruments and production equipment as well as semiconductors."

More happenings made 1971 a milestone year. Stanford University and Stanford Research Institute cut their ties, the latter becoming independent as SRI International. Gene Amdahl, principal architect in Menlo Park of IBM's highly successful 360 mainframe series, left IBM to develop "plug-compatible manufacturing" at his own company. Also in 1971, Steve Wozniak went to work for Hewlett-Packard as a programmer. After Nolan Bushnell founded Atari in 1972 and began the computer games industry with a game called Pong, Wozniak's younger friend, Steve Jobs, joined Atari.

Although Pong thrived, consumer electronics -- epitomized by the digital watch and the basic pocket calculator -- enjoyed only a brief heyday in the United States before being crushed by Japanese competition, an event coinciding with the 1974-75 recession. Ampex was especially hard hit.

Biotechnology made one of its first big splashes in 1973 when Stanley N. Cohen of the Stanford medical school faculty and Herbert W. Boyer of the UC San Francisco medical school first demonstrated gene splicing. Patents on gene cloning and gene splicing became the two universities' big earners, with Genentech of South San Francisco a major developer.

Hewlett-Packard introduced the first programmable pocket calculator in 1974, co-opting the place of engineers' slide rules and starting HP in the computer business. In the same year, Siple Station in Antarctica was founded to study upper atmosphere physics in experiments headed by Robert Helliwell, Stanford electrical engineering professor.

At Stanford University, the Center for Integrated Systems took shape in 1974 to coordinate the combined forces of business, government, and higher education in the technology race. One of its codirectors was John Linvill, EE professor and inventor of telesensory processes such as the one enabling his blind daughter to read rapidly -- and, in time, to earn a doctorate.

Kenneth Arrow, who had taught at Stanford from 1949 to 1968, and who later returned, was named co-winner of the 1972 Nobel Prize for Economics for his contributions to welfare economics and general economic equilibrium theory. Paul J. Flory of Stanford received the 1974 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his investigations of synthetic and natural polymers, the macromolecules developed most notably in nylon and synthetic rubber.

Read about the Story of the Personal Computer

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