history of technology

Stroll by means of half a soccer discipline’s price of low partitions, submitting cupboards, and desks. Be aware the curved mirrors hanging from the ceiling, the higher to view the maze of engineers, technicians, and assist employees of…

The denunciations were sometimes extreme.“Fuzzy theory is wrong, wrong, and pernicious,” said William Kahan, a highly regarded professor of computer sciences and mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley in 1975. “The…

In San Francisco on Feb. 27, 1989, Intel Corp., Santa Clara, Calif., startled the world of high technology by presenting the first ever 1-million-transistor microprocessor, which was also the company’s first such chip to use a reduced…

In one corner stood the defending champion, Texas Instruments. In the other stood the challenger, Fairchild Semiconductor. The referee, judge, promoter, and only spectator was Polaroid. In contention was the contract for the electronics…

In late 1969, C. Peter McColough, chairman of Xerox Corp., told the New York Society of Security Analysts that Xerox was determined to develop “the architecture of information” to solve the problems that had been created by the…

The thermostat chased me for 10 years.That is pretty extreme, by the way. If you’ve got an idea for a business or a new product, you usually don’t have to wait a decade to make sure it’s worth doing.For most of the 10 years that I…

Time and again, in his earliest attempts at controlling laser printers, John Warnock got the message, “Page Too Complex,” from a recalcitrant machine. Any system he designed, he vowed, would have to have a “Print Anything” architecture.…

This article was first published as "Design case history: the Commodore 64." It appeared in the March 1985 issue of IEEE Spectrum. A PDF version is available on IEEE Xplore. The diagrams and photographs of chips, circuit boards, and…

In January 1981, a handful of semiconductor engineers at MOS Technology in West Chester, Pa., a subsidiary of Commodore International Ltd., began designing a graphics chip and a sound chip to sell to whoever wanted to…