The MAD Origins of the Computer Age

It was the “missile gap” that would impregnate Silicon Valley with the purpose and capital to grow to its famed stature as the center of computer innovation in the world. During the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, when Robert S. McNamara was Secretary of Defense, the US undertook an enormous military buildup, with the intercontinental missile […]

Why AT&T Invented and Shared the Transistor that Started the Digital Revolution

The transistor emerged from the research efforts of AT&T, the corporate behemoth that was formed by JP Morgan and guided by US policy to become the nation’s primary telecommunications provider. Fed by AT&T’s monopoly profits, Bell Labs became a virtual “patent factory”, producing thousands of technical innovations and patents a year by the 1930s. One of its major challenges was to find a more efficient successor to the vacuum tube.

How IT Came to Rule the World, 2.8: Apple, Silicon Valley and the Counter-Cultural Impulse

While Woz earned his title as the “Mozart of digital design” through his design of the Apple II, Jobs helped conceive the computer as a democratizing tool with the motto-“One person–one computer”. The microcomputer was sold as a tool that would balance the unequal relationship between institutions and the individual. It would empower the individual and allow their inner artist to emerge. The Apple II Computer went on to become the darling of the counter-cultural crowd and would remain a symbol of resistance against the corporate forces of IBM and later the predatory practices of Microsoft.

how IT came to rule the world, 1.8: Bell Labs and the Transistor

Three licensees in particular, Motorola, Texas Instruments and Fairchild took advantage of AT&T’s transistor technology.