Silicon Insider: The Memory Whiz Kids
March 12 -- What is the greatest high-tech accomplishment of the last half-century? The integrated circuit? The personal computer? The Internet? Mapping the human genome? Pong?
They are all extraordinary, earthshaking achievements. And yet, each had a certain inevitability.
Once engineering entrepreneur Jean Hoerni came up with the planar process for producing silicon chips, and his Fairchild compatriot Gordon Moore enunciated his "law" of semiconductor innovation, you could just about predict the next few decades of the electronics revolution.
If engineers Federico Faggin and Ted Hoff, et al, hadn't come up with the microprocessor at Intel, a similar team at Motorola would have done so soon after. With the personal computer, there were at least a dozen comparable machines on the market when Steve Wozniak built the Apple I.
As for video games, Nolan Bushnell admitted at the time that in building Atari he merely recognized before anyone else that the games he played in college on a mainframe computer could now be put into an arcade machine.
And does anyone believe that the Internet (and Netscape) was anything but an idea whose time had come?
The Miracle of Memory
This doesn't take anything away from the achievements of these remarkable men any more than does history diminish the achievements of Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell or Guglielmo Marconi.
It's just that these miracles are more in the timing and the synthesis of diverse components than in any profound cognitive breakthrough. Their greatness lies in results, not invention.
But there is one, hardly noticed, arena of high technology where miracles not only occur, but have taken place with such regularity over the last five decades that they constitute one of the greatest intellectual success stories in history.
It is the storage of information, be it on punched cards, magnetic tape, Winchester disk drives, floppy disks, Zip drives, RAM or ROM, CD-ROM, and DVD.
Punch Cards, Paper Tape
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