Innovation & Wealth › The information age
Microchips and the personal computer
integrated circuit 1958–59; Intel 4004 1971; PC era 1975–1995· Innovation· Innovations & industries
Well documentedSolid records, texts or physical evidence.
Putting many transistors on one chip, then a whole processor, made computers cheap enough for every desk and home.
See it on the Innovation & Wealth map →What happened
In 1958 Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments built the first integrated circuit, several components on one chip; in 1959 Robert Noyce at Fairchild made a practical silicon version. Military and NASA orders bought most early chips. Intel's 4004 (1971) put a whole processor on one chip. Hobby kits like the Altair (1975) led to the Apple II (1977) and IBM PC (1981). US households with a computer rose from 8% (1984) to about half by 2000.
Impact on society and the economy
Cheap computing changed nearly all office work and created new fortunes in software and chips. Clerks, typists, and typewriter and minicomputer makers lost out, and pay gaps widened between college and non-college workers.
How we know
Kilby's 1958 lab notebook and his 2000 Nobel Prize, Noyce's 1959 patent, Census surveys of household computer ownership, and price indexes tracking computing's steep fall in cost.
Still debated
Texas Instruments and Fairchild fought over chip patents until a 1966 cross-license. Economists still debate why computers took until the late 1990s to show up in productivity statistics.
Inside this (8)
Connections (3)
▸Transistor (Bell Labs) led to Microchips and the personal computerWell documented
The connection
Transistors replaced vacuum tubes, but wiring thousands of them together by hand was unreliable, a problem engineers called the 'tyranny of numbers.' Kilby and Noyce solved it by forming transistors and their connections together on one piece of semiconductor, the integrated circuit. Shrinking transistors on chips then drove decades of cheaper, faster computers.
When and how
Bell Labs, New Jersey (1947); Texas Instruments, Dallas (1958); Fairchild Semiconductor, Mountain View (1959), whose founders had worked under transistor co-inventor William Shockley.
How we know
Patents, lab notebooks and the inventors' own accounts trace a direct technical line from the transistor to the chip.
Debates
The link itself is not in doubt; debate is over credit between Kilby and Noyce and over how much military funding steered the path.
▸Intel and Moore's law set the pace of Microchips and the personal computerWell documented
The connection
Intel's 4004 (1971) put a computer's processor on one chip, and later Intel chips like the 8080 and 8088 powered early PCs. Moore's law, co-founder Gordon Moore's forecast that chip density doubles about every two years, became the industry's planning target, so the whole sector raced to meet it, driving costs down year after year.
When and how
Mountain View and later Santa Clara, California; the 4004 was designed in 1969–71 for Japan's Busicom calculators by Federico Faggin, Ted Hoff, Stan Mazor and Busicom's Masatoshi Shima.
How we know
Chip-density data tracked Moore's forecast closely for decades, and the industry's shared roadmaps (1990s–2016) explicitly used it as a target.
Debates
Was Moore's law a natural trend or a self-fulfilling prophecy? Intel did not invent the integrated circuit itself; Texas Instruments and Fairchild did, in 1958–59.
▸Microchips and the personal computer put on desks the computers linked by The internetWell documented
The connection
The internet's early nodes were costly university and military computers. Cheap microprocessors brought personal computers into offices and homes in the 1980s and 1990s, giving the network millions of potential users. Chips also power the routers and modems that carry internet traffic.
When and how
Silicon Valley and worldwide, from the Intel 4004 in 1971 to the 1990s, when dial-up modems connected home PCs to the internet.
How we know
PC sales and internet host counts rose together; hosts grew from about 1,000 in 1984 to about 1 million in 1992.
Debates
Whether the internet would have spread as fast through other devices, such as France's Minitel terminals, without cheap PCs is a common what-if.