CHAPTER 12
The Integrated Circuit Chip: From the Roswell Crash Site to Silicon
Valley
WITH THE NIGHT-VISION IMAGE INTENSIFIER PROJECT UNDER way at Fort
Belvoir and the Project Horizon team
trying to swim upstream against the tide of civilian management of
the U.S. space program, I turned my attention to the next of the
Roswell crash fragments that looked especially intriguing: the
charred semiconductor wafers that had broken off some larger device.
I hadn’t made these my priorities at first, not knowing what they
really were, until General Trudeau asked me to take a closer look.
“Talk to some of the rocket scientists down at Alamogordo about
these things, Phil, “ he said. “I think they’ll know what we should
do with them. “
I knew that in the days immediately following the crash, General
Twining had met with the Alamogordo group of the Air Materiel
Command and had described some of the debris to them. But I didn’t
know how detailed his descriptions were or whether they even knew
about the wafers we had in our file.
“I want to talk to some of the scientists up here, too, “ I said.
“Especially, I want to see some of the engineers from the defense
contractors. Maybe they can figure out what the engineering process
is for these things. “ “Go over to Bell Labs, Phil, “ General Trudeau also suggested. “The
transistor came out of their shop and these things look a lot like
transistorized circuits.“
I’d heard that General Twining had worked very closely with both
Bell Labs and Motorola on communications research during the war,
afterwards at the Alamogordo test site for V2 missile launches, and
after the Roswell crash. Whether he had brought them any material
from the crash or showed them the tiny silicon chips was a matter of
pure speculation. I only know that the entire field of circuit
miniaturization took a giant leap in 1947 with the invention of the
transistor and the first solid state components.
By the late
1950s,transistors had replaced the vacuum tube in radios and had
turned the wall-sized wooden box of the 1940s into the portable
plastic radio you could hear blaring away at the shore on a hot July
Sunday. The electronics industry had taken a major technological
jump in less than ten years, and I had to wonder privately whether
any Roswell material had gotten out that I didn’t know about prior
to my taking over Foreign Technology in 1961.
I didn’t realize it at first when I showed those silicon wafers to
General Trudeau, but I was to become very quickly and intimately
involved with the burgeoning computer industry and a very small,
completely invisible, cog in an assembly line process that fifteen
years later would result in the first microcomputer systems and the
personal computer revolution.
Over the course of the years since I joined the army in 1942, my
career took me through the stages of vacuum tube based devices, like
our radios and radars in World War II, to component chassis.
These
were large circuitry units that, if they went down, could be changed
in sections, smaller sections, and finally to tiny transistors and
transistorized electronic components. The first army computers I saw
were room sized, clanking vacuum tube monsters that were always
breaking down and, by today’s standards, took an eternity to
calculate even the simplest of answers. They were simply oil filled
data pots. But they amazed those of us who had never seen computers
work before.
At Red Canyon and in Germany, the tracking and targeting radars we
used were controlled by new transistorized chassis computers that
were compact enough to fit onto a truck and travel with the
battalion. So when I opened up my nut file and saw the charred matte
gray quarter sized, cracker shaped silicon wafers with the gridlines
etched onto them like tiny printed lines on the cover of a match
book, I could make an educated guess about their function even
though I’d never seen anything of the like before. I knew, however,
that our rocket scientists and the university researchers who worked
with the development laboratories at Bell, Motorola, and IBM would
more than understand the primary function of these chips and figure
out what we needed to do to make some of our own.
But first I called Professor Hermann Oberth for basic background on
what, if any, development might have taken place after the Roswell
crash. Dr. Oberth knew the Alamogordo scientists and probably
received second hand the substance of the conversations General
Twining had with his Alamogordo group in the hours after the
retrieval of the vehicle. And if General Twining described some of
the debris, did he describe these little silicon chips? And if he
did, in those months when the ENIAC - the first working computer -
was just cranking up at the Aberdeen Ordnance Testing Grounds in
Maryland, what did the scientists make of those chips?
“They saw these at the Walker Field hangar, “ Dr. Oberth told me.
“All of them at Alamogordo flew over to Roswell with General Twining
to oversee the shipment to Wright Field. “
Oberth described what happened that day after the crash when a team
of AMC rocket scientists pored over the bits and pieces of debris
from the site. Some of the debris was packed for flight on B29s.
Other material, especially the crates that wound up at Fort Riley,
were loaded onto deuce and a halfs for the drive. Dr. Oberth said
that years later, von Braun had told him how those scientists who
literally had to stand in line to have their equations processed by
the experimental computer in Aberdeen Maryland were in awe of the
microscopic circuitry etched into the charred wafer chips that had
spilled out of the craft.
Von Braun had asked General Twining whether anyone at Bell Labs was
going to be contacted about this find. Twining seemed surprised at
first, but when von Braun told him about the experiments on solid
state components - material whose electrons don’t need to be excited
by heat in order to conduct current - Twining became intrigued. What
if these chips were components of a very advanced solid state
circuitry? von Braun asked him. What if one of the reasons the army
could find no electronic wiring on the craft were the layers of
these wafers that ran throughout the ship? These circuit chips could
be the nervous system of the craft, carrying signals and
transmitting commands just like the nervous system in a human body.
General Twining’s only experience had been with the heavily
insulated vacuum tube devices from World War II, where the
multistrand wires were covered with cloth. He’d never seen metallic
printed chips like these before. How did they work? he’d asked
von Braun.
The German scientist wasn’t sure, although he guessed they worked on
the same principle as the transistors that laboratories were trying
to develop to the point where they could be manufactured
commercially. It would completely transform the electronics
industry, von Braun explained to General Twining, nothing short of a
revolution. The Germans had been desperately trying to develop
circuitry of this sort during the war, but Hitler, convinced the war
would be over by 1941, told the German computer researchers that the Wehrmacht had no need for computers that had a development timetable
greater than one year. They’d all be celebrating victory in Berlin
before the end of the year.
But the research into solid state components that the Germans had
been doing and the early work at Bell
Labs was nothing compared to the marvel that Twining had shown von
Braun and the other rocket scientists in
New Mexico. Under the magnifying glass, the group thought they saw
not just a single solid state switch but a
whole system of switches integrated into each other and comprising
what looked like an entire circuit or system
of circuits. They couldn’t be sure because no one had ever seen
anything even remotely like this before.
But it
showed them an image of what the future of electronics could be if a
way could be found to manufacture this
kind of circuit on Earth. Suddenly, the huge guidance control
systems necessary to control the flight of a rocket,
which, in 1947, were too big to be squeezed into the fuselage of the
rocket, could be miniaturized so that the
rocket could have its own automatic guidance system. If we could
duplicate what the EBEs had, we, too, would have the ability to
explore space. In effect, the reverse engineering of solid state
integrated circuitry began in the weeks and months after the crash
even though William Shockley at Bell Labs was already working on a
version of his transistor as early as 1946.
In the summer of 1947, the scientists at Alamogordo were only aware
of the solid state circuit research under way at Bell Labs and
Motorola. So they pointed Nathan Twining to research scientists at
both companies and agreed to help him conduct the very early
briefings into the nature of the Roswell find. The army, very
covertly, turned some of the components over to research engineers
for an inspection, and by the early 1950s the transistor had been
invented and transistorized circuits were now turning up in consumer
products as well as in military electronics systems. The era of the
vacuum tube, the single piece of eighty year old technology upon
which an entire generation of communications devices including
television and digital computers was built, was now coming to a
close with the discovery in the desert of an entirely new
technology.
The radio vacuum tube was a legacy of nineteenth century
experimentation with electric current. Like many historic scientific
discoveries, the theory behind the vacuum tube was uncovered almost
by chance, and nobody really knew what it was or cared much about it
until years later. The radio vacuum tube probably reached its
greatest utility from the 1930s through the 1950s, until the
technology we discovered at Roswell made it all but obsolete.
The
principle behind the radio vacuum tube, first discovered by Thomas
Edison in the 1880s while he was experimenting with different
components for his incandescent lightbulb, was that current, which
typically flowed in either direction across a conductive material
such as a wire, could be made to flow in only one direction when
passed through a vacuum. This directed flow of current, called the
“Edison effect, “ is the scientific principle behind the
illumination of the filament material inside the vacuum of the
incandescent lightbulb, a technology that has remained remarkably
the same for over a hundred years.
But the lightbulb technology that Edison discovered back in
the1880s, then put aside only to experiment with it again in the
early twentieth century, also had another equally important
function. Because the flow of electrons across the single filament
wire went in only one direction, the vacuum tube was also a type of
automatic switch. Excite the flow of electrons across the wire and
the current flowed only in the direction you wanted it to. You
didn’t need to throw a switch to turn on a circuit manually because
the vacuum tube could do that for you.
Edison had actually
discovered the first automatic switching device, which could be
applied to hundreds of electronic products from the radio sets that
I grew up with in the1920s to the communications networks and radar
banks of World War II and to the television sets of the 1950s. In
fact, the radio tube was the single component that enabled us to
begin the worldwide communications network that was already in place
by the early twentieth century.
Radio vacuum tubes also had another important application that
wasn’t discovered until experimenters in the infant science of
computers first recognized the need for them in the 1930s and then
again in the 1940s. Because they were switches, opening and closing
circuits, they could be programmed to reconfigure a computer to
accomplish different tasks. The computer itself had, in principle,
remained essentially the same type of calculating device that
Charles Babbage first invented in the 1830s. It was a set of
internal gears or wheels that acted as counters and a section of
“memory” that stored numbers until it was their turn to be
processed. Babbage’s computer was operated manually by a technician
who threw mechanical switches in order to input raw numbers and
execute the program that processed the numbers.
The simple principle behind the first computer, called by its
inventor the “Analytical Engine, “ was that the same machine could
process an infinite variety and types of calculations by
reconfiguring its parts through a switching mechanism. The machine
had a component for inputting numbers or instructions to the
processor; the processor itself, which completed the calculations; a
central control unit, or CPU, that organized and sequenced the tasks
to make sure the machine was doing the right job at the right time;
a memory area for storing numbers; and finally a component that
output the results of the calculations to a type of printer: the
same basic components you find in all computers even today.
The same machine could add, subtract, multiply, or divide and even
store numbers from one arithmetical process to the next. It could
even store the arithmetical computation instructions themselves from
job to job. And Babbage borrowed a punch card process invented by
Joseph Jacquard for programming weaving looms. Babbage’s programs
could be stored on series of punch cards and fed into the computer
to control the sequence of processing numbers. Though this may sound
like a startling invention, it was Industrial Revolution technology
that began in the late eighteenth century for the purely utilitarian
challenge of processing large numbers for the British military. Yet,
in concept, it was an entirely new principle in machine design that
very quietly started the digital revolution.
Because Babbage’s machine was hand powered and cumbersome, little
was done with it through the
nineteenth century, and by the1880s, Babbage himself would be
forgotten. However, the practical application of
electricity to mechanical appliances and the delivery of electrical
power along supply grids, invented by Thomas
Edison and refined by Nikola Tesla, gave new life to the calculation
machine. The concept of an automatic
calculation machine would, inspire American inventors to devise
their own electrically powered calculators to
process large numbers in a competition to calculate the 1890 U.S.
Census.
The winner of the competition was Herman Hollerith, whose
electrically powered calculator was a monster device that not only
processed numbers but displayed the progress of the process on large
clocks for all to see. He was so successful that the large railroad
companies hired him to process their numbers. By the turn of the
century his company, the Computing Tabulating and Recording Company,
had become the single largest developer of automatic calculating
machines. By 1929, when Hollerith died, his company had become the
automation conglomerate, IBM.
Right about the time of Hollerith’s death, a German engineer named
Konrad Zuse approached some of the same challenges that had
confronted Charles Babbage a hundred years earlier: how to build his
own version of a universal computing machine that could reconfigure
itself depending upon the type of calculation the operator wanted to
perform. Zuse decided that instead of working with a machine that
operated on the decimal system, which limited the types of
arithmetic calculations it could perform, his machine would use only
two numbers, 0 and 1, the binary system.
This meant that he could
process any type of mathematical equation through the opening or
closing of a series of electromagnetic relays, switches that would
act as valves or gates either letting current through or shutting it
off. These relays were the same types of devices that the large
telephone companies, like the Bell system in the United States, were
using as the basis of their networks. By marrying an electrical
power supply and electric switches to the architecture of Babbage’s
Analytical Engine and basing his computations in a binary instead of
a decimal system, Zuse had come up with the European version of the
first electrical digital computer, an entirely new device. It was
just three years before the German invasion of Poland and the
outbreak of World War II.
In the United States at about the same time as Zuse was assembling
his first computer in his parents’ living room, Harvard mathematics
professor Howard Aiken was trying to reconstruct a theoretical
version of Babbage’s computer, also using electromagnetic relays as
switching devices and relying on a binary number system. The
difference between Aiken and Zuse was that Aiken had academic
credentials and his background as an innovative mathematician got
him into the office of Thomas Watson, president of IBM, to whom he
presented his proposal for the first American digital computer.
Watson was impressed, authorized a budget for $1 million, and, right
before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the project design was started up
at Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was then moved to IBM headquarters
in New York during the war.
Because of their theoretical ability to calculate large sets of
numbers in a relatively short period of time, digital computers were
drafted into the war effort in the United Kingdom as a code breaking
device. By 1943, at the same time that IBM’s first shiny stainless
steel version of Aiken’s computer was up and running in Endicott,
New York, the British were using their dedicated crypto analytical
Colossus computer to break the German codes and decipher the code
creating ability of the German Enigma - the code machine that the
Nazis believed made their transmissions indecipherable to the
Allies.
Unlike the IBM-Aiken computer at Harvard and Konrad Zuse’s
experimental computer in Berlin, the Colossus used radio vacuum
tubes as relay switches and was, therefore, hundreds of times faster
than any experimental computer using electromagnetic relays. The
Colossus, therefore, was a true breakthrough because it married the
speed of vacuum tube technology with the component design of the
Analytical Engine to create the first modern era digital computer.
The British used the Colossus so effectively that they quickly felt
the need to build more of them to process the increasingly large
volume of encrypted transmissions the Germans were sending, ignorant
of the fact that the Allies were decoding every word and outsmarting
them at every turn. I would argue even to this day that the
technological advantage the Allies enjoyed in intelligence gathering
apparatus, specifically code breaking computers and radar, enabled
us to win the war despite Hitler’s initial successes and his early
weapon advantages. The Allies’ use of the digital computer in World
War II was an example of how a superior technological advantage can
make the difference between victory and defeat no matter what kinds
of weapons or numbers of troops the enemy is able to deploy.
The American and British experience with computers during the war
and our government’s commitment to developing a viable digital
computer led to the creation, in the years immediately following the
war, of a computer called the Electronic Numerical Integrator and
Calculator, or ENIAC. ENIAC was the brain child of Howard Aiken and
one of our Army R&D brain trust advisers, the mathematician John von
Neumann. Although it operated on a decimal instead of a binary
system and had a very small memory, it relied on radio vacuum tube
switching technology. For its time it was the first of what today
are called “number crunchers. “
When measured against the way computers developed over the years
since its first installation, especially the personal computers of
today, ENIAC was something of a real dinosaur. It was loud, hot,
cumbersome, fitful, and required the power supply of an entire town
to keep it going. It couldn’t stay up for very long because the
radio tubes, always unreliable even under the best working
conditions, would blow out after only a few hours’ work and had to
be replaced. But the machine worked, it crunched the numbers it was
fed, and it showed the way for the next model, which reflected the
sophisticated symbolic architectural design of John von Neumann.
Von Neumann suggested that instead of feeding the computer the
programs you wanted it to run every time
you turned it on, the programs themselves could be stored in the
computer permanently. By treating the
programs themselves as components of the machine, stored right in
the hardware, the computer could change
between programs, or the routines of subprograms, as necessary in
order to solve problems. This meant that larger routines could be
processed into subroutines, which themselves could be organized into
templates to solve similar problems. In complex applications,
programs could call up other programs again and again without the
need of human intervention and could even change the subprograms to
fit the application. von Neumann had invented block programming, the
basis for the sophisticated engineering and business programming of
the late 1950s and 1960s and the great, great grandmother of today’s
object oriented programming.
By 1947, it had all come together: the design of the machine, the
electrical power supply, the radio vacuum tube technology, the logic
of machine processing, von Neumann’s mathematical architecture, and
practical applications for the computer’s use. But just a few years
shy of the midpoint of the century, the computer itself was the
product of eighteenth and nineteenth century thinking and
technology. In fact, given the short comings of the radio tube and
the enormous power demands and cooling requirements to keep the
computer working, the development of the computer seemed to have
come to a dead end.
Although IBM and Bell Labs were investing huge
sums of development money into designing a computer that had a lower
operational and maintenance overhead, it seemed, given the
technology of the digital computer circa 1947, that there was no
place it could go. It was simply an expensive to build, expensive to
run, lumbering elephant at the end of the line. And then an alien
spacecraft fell out of the skies over Roswell, scattered across the
desert floor, and in one evening everything changed.
In 1948 the first junction transistor - a microscopically thin
silicon sandwich of w-type silicon, in which some of the atoms have
an extra electron, and p-type silicon, in which some of the atoms
have one less electron - was devised by physicist William Shockley.
The invention was credited to Bell Telephone Laboratories, and, as
if by magic, the dead end that had stopped the development of the
dinosaur like ENIAC generation of computers melted away and an
entirely new generation of miniaturized circuitry began.
Where the
radio tube circuit required an enormous power supply to heat it up
because heat generated the electricity, the transistor required very
low levels of powers and no heating up time because the transistor
amplified the stream of electrons that flowed into its base. Because
it required only a low level of current, it could be powered by
batteries. Because it didn’t rely on a heat source to generate
current and it was so small, many transistors could be packed into a
very small space, allowing for the miniaturization of circuitry
components. Finally, because it didn’t burn out like the radio tube,
it was much more reliable.
Thus, within months after the Roswell
crash and the first exposure of the silicon wafer technology to
companies already involved in the research and development of
computers, the limitations on the size and power of the computer
suddenly dropped like the removal of a roadblock on a highway and
the next generation of computers went into development. This set up
for Army R&D, especially during the years I was there, the
opportunity for us to encourage that development with defense
contracts calling for the implementation of integrated circuit
devices into subsequent generations of weapons systems.
More than one historian of the microcomputer age has written that no
one before 1947 foresaw the invention of the transistor or had even
dreamed about an entirely new technology that relied upon
semiconductors, which were silicon based and not carbon based like
the Edison incandescent tube. Bigger than the idea of a calculating
machine or an Analytical Engine or any combination of the components
that made up the first computers of the 1930s and 1940s, the
invention of the transistor and its natural evolution to the silicon
chip of integrated circuitry was beyond what anyone could call
a quantum leap of technology.
The entire development arc of the radio
tube, from Edison’s first experiments with filament for his
incandescent lightbulb to the vacuum tubes that formed the switching
mechanisms of ENIAC, lasted about fifty years. The development of
the silicon transistor seemed to come upon us in a matter of months.
And, had I not seen the silicon wafers from the Roswell crash with
my own eyes, held them in my own hands, talked about them with
Hermann Oberth, Wernher von Braun, or Hans Kohler, and heard the
reports from these now dead scientists of the meetings between
Nathan Twining, Vannevar Bush, and researchers at Bell Labs, I would
have thought the invention of the transistor was a miracle. I know
now how it came about.
As history revealed, the invention of the transistor was only the
beginning of an integrated circuit technology that developed through
the 1950s and continues right through to the present. By the time I
became personally involved in 1961, the American marketplace had
already witnessed the retooling of Japan and Germany in the 1950s
and Korea and Taiwan in the late 1950s through the early 1960s.
General Trudeau was concerned about this, not because he considered
these countries our economic enemies but because he believed that
American industry would suffer as a result of its complacency about
basic research and development.
He expressed this to me on many
occasions during our meetings, and history has proved him to be
correct. General Trudeau believed that the American industrial
economy enjoyed a harvest of technology in the years immediately
following World War II, the effects of which were still under way in
the 1960s, but that it would soon slow down because R&D was an
inherently costly undertaking that didn’t immediately contribute to
a company’s bottom line. And you had to have a good bottom line,
General Trudeau always said, to keep your stockholders happy or else
they would revolt and throw the existing management team right out
of the company. By throwing their efforts into the bottom line,
Trudeau said, the big American industries were actually destroying
themselves just like a family that spends all its savings.
“You have to keep on investing in yourself, Phil, “ the General
would like to say when he’d look up from his Wall
Street Journal before our morning meetings and remark about how
stock analysts always liked to place their
value on the wrong thing.
“Sure, these companies have to make a
profit, but you look at the Japanese and the Germans and they know
the value of basic research, “ he once said to me.
“American
companies expect the government to pay for all their research, and
that’s what you and I have to do if we want to keep them working.
But there’s going to come a time when we can’t afford to pay for it
any longer. Then who’s going to foot the bill?”
General Trudeau was worrying about how the drive for new electronics
products based upon miniaturized circuitry was creating entirely new
markets that were shutting out American companies. He said that it
was becoming cheaper for American companies to have their products
manufactured for them in Asia, where companies had already retooled
after the war to produce transistorized components, than for
American companies, which had heavily invested in the manufacturing
technology of the nineteenth century, to do it themselves.
He knew
that the requirement for space exploration, for challenging the
hostile EBEs in their own territory, relied on the development of an
integrated circuit technology so that the electronic components of
spacecraft could be miniaturized to fit the size requirements of
rocket propelled vehicles. The race to develop more intelligent
missiles and ordnance also required the development of new types of
circuitry that could be packed into smaller and smaller spaces. But
retooled Japanese and German industries were the only ones able to
take immediate advantage of what General Trudeau called the “new
electronics. “
For American industry to get onto the playing field the basic
research would have to be paid for by the military. It was something
General Trudeau was willing to fight for at the Pentagon because he
knew that was the only way we could get the weapons only a handful
of us knew we needed to fight a skirmish war against aliens only a
handful of us knew we were fighting.
Arthur Trudeau was a
battlefield general engaged in a lonely military campaign that
national policy and secrecy laws forbade him even to talk about. And
as the gulf of time widened between the Roswell crash and the
concerns over postwar economic expansion, even the people who were
fighting the war alongside General Trudeau were, one by one,
beginning to die away. Industry could fight the war for us, General
Trudeau believed, if it was properly seeded with ideas and the money
to develop them. By 1961, we had turned our attention to the
integrated circuit.
Government military weapons spending and the requirements for space
exploration had already heavily funded the transistorized component
circuit. The radars and missiles I was commanding at Red Canyon, New
Mexico, in 1958 relied on miniaturized components for their
reliability and portability. New generations of tracking radars on
the drawing boards in 1960 were even more sophisticated and
electronically intelligent than the weapons I was aiming at Soviet
targets in Germany. In the United States, Japanese and Taiwanese
radios that fit into the palm of your hand were on the market.
Computers like ENIAC, once the size of a small warehouse, now
occupied rooms no larger than closets and, while still generating
heat, no longer blew out because of overheated radio vacuum tubes.
Minicomputers, helped by government R&D funding, were still a few
years away from market, but were already in a design phase.
Television sets and stereophonic phonographs that offered solid
state electronics were coming on the market, and companies like IBM,
Sperry-Rand, and NCR were beginning to bring electronic office
machines onto the market. It was the beginning of a new age of
electronics, helped, in part, by government funding of basic
research into the development and manufacture of integrated circuit
products.
But the real prize, the development of what actually had
been recovered at Roswell, was still a few years away. When it
arrived, again spurred by the requirements of military weapons
development and space travel, it caused another revolution.
The history of the printed circuit and the microprocessor is also
the history of a technology that allowed engineers to squeeze more
and more circuitry into a smaller and smaller space. It’s the
history of the integrated circuit, which developed throughout the
1960s, evolved into large scale integration by the early 1970s, very
large scale integration by the middle 1970s, just before the
emergence of the first real personal computers, and ultra large
scale integration by the early 1980s. Today’s 200 plus megahertz, multigigabyte hard drive desktop computers are the results of the
integrated circuit technology that began in the 1960s and has
continued to the present. The jump from the basic transistorized
integrated printed circuit of the 1960s to large scale integration
was made possible by the development of the microprocessor in 1972.
Once the development process of engineering a more tightly compacted
circuit had been inspired by the invention of the transistor in
1948, and fueled by the need to develop better, faster, and smaller
computers, it continued on a natural progression until the engineers
at Intel developed the first microprocessor, a four bit central
processing unit called the 4004, in 1972.
This year marked the
beginning of the microcomputer industry, although the first personal
microcomputers didn’t appear on the market until the development of
Intel’s 8080ª. That computer chip was the heart of the Altair
computer, the first product to package a version of a high level
programming language called BASIC, which allowed non-engineering
types to program the machine and create applications for it. Soon
companies like Motorola and Zilog had their own microprocessors on
the market, and by 1977 the Motorola 6502-powered Apple II was on
the market, joined by the 8080ª Radio Shack, the Commodore PET, the
Atari, and the Heathkit.
Operationally, at its very heart, the
microprocessor shares the same binary processing functions and large
arrays of digital switches as its ancestors, the big mainframes of
the 1950s and 1960s and the transistorized minis of the late 1960s
and early 1970s. Functionally, the microprocessor also shares the
same kinds of tasks as Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine of the
1830s: reading numbers, storing numbers, logically processing
numbers, and outputting the results. The microprocessor just puts
everything into a much smaller space and moves it along at a much
faster speed.
In 1979, Apple Computer had begun selling the first home computer
floppy disk operating system for data and program storage that
kicked the microcomputer revolution into a higher gear. Not only
could users input data via a keyboard or tape cassette player, they
could store relatively large amounts of data, such as documents or
mathematical projections, on transportable, erasable, and
interchangeable Mylar disks that the computer was able to read. Now
the computer reached beyond the electronics hobbyist into the work
place.
By the end of the year, MicroPro’s introduction of the first
fully functional word processor called WordStar, and Personal
Software’s release of the very first electronic spreadsheet called
VisiCalc, so transformed the workplace that the desktop computer
became a necessity for any young executive on his or her way up the
corporate ladder. And by the early 1980s, with the introduction of
the Apple Macintosh and the object oriented computer environment,
not only the workplace but the whole world looked like a very
different place than it did in the early 1960s.
Even Dr. Vannevar
Bush’s concept of a type of research query language based not on a
linear outline but on an intellectual relationship to something
embedded in a body of text became a reality with the release of a
computer program by Apple called HyperCard.
It was as if from the year 1947 to 1980 a fundamental paradigm shift
in the ability of human kind to process information took place.
Computers themselves almost became something like a silicon based
life form, inspiring the carbon based life forms on planet Earth to
develop them, grow them, and even help them reproduce. With computer
directed process control programs now in place in virtually all
major industries, software that writes software, neural network
based expert systems that learn from their own experience in the
real world, and current experiments under way to grow almost
microscopically thin silicon based chips in the weightless
environment of earth orbit may be the forerunner of a time when
automated orbital factories routinely grow and harvest new silicon
material for microprocessors more sophisticated than we can even
imagine at the present.
Were all of this to be true, could it not be
argued that the silicon wafers we recovered from Roswell were the
real masters and space travelers and the EBE creatures their hosts
or servants? Once implanted successfully on Earth, our culture
having reached a point of readiness through its development of the
first digital computers, would not the natural development stream,
starting from the invention of the transistor, have carried us to
the point where we achieve a symbiotic relationship with the silicon
material that carries our data and enables us to become more
creative and successful?
Maybe the Roswell crash, which helped us develop the technological
basis for the weapons systems to
protect our planet from the EBEs, was also the mechanism for
successfully implanting a completely alien non-humanoid
life form that survives from host to host like a virus, a digital
Ebola that we humans will carry to another planet someday. Or what
if an enemy wanted to implant the perfect spying or sabotage
mechanism into a culture?
Then the implantation of the microchip
based circuit into our technology by the EBEs would be the perfect
method. Was it implanted as sabotage or as something akin to the
gift of fire? Maybe the Roswell crash in 1947 was an event waiting
to happen, like poisoned fruit dropping from the tree into a
playground. Once bitten, the poison takes effect.
“Hold your horses, Phil, “ General Trudeau would say when I would
speculate too much. “Remember, you’ve got a bunch of scientists you
need to talk to and the people at Bell Labs are waiting to see your
report when you’ve finished talking to the Alamogordo group. “
It was 1961 and the miniaturization of computer and electronic
circuitry had already begun, but my report to the general and
appointments he was arranging for me at Sperry-Rand, Hughes, and
Bell Labs were for meetings with scientists to determine how their
respective companies were proceeding with applying miniaturized
circuitry into designs for weapons systems. The inspiration for
microcircuitry had fallen out of the sky at Roswell and set the
development of digital computers off in an entirely new direction.
It was my job now to use the process of weapons development,
especially the development of guidance systems for ballistic
missiles, to implement the application of microcircuitry systems to
these new generations of weapons.
General Trudeau and I were among
the first scouts in what would be the electronic battlefield of the
1980s.
“Don’t worry, General, I’ve got my appointments all set up, “ I told
him. I knew how carried away I could get, but I was an intelligence
officer first, and that meant you start with a blank page and fill
it in. “But I think the people at Bell Labs have already seen these
things before.“
And they actually did - in 1947.
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