The tubes used in early computers were not only slow and consumed a lot of power, but also expensive and easy to be damaged. Therefore, mass production of computers requires electronic components that are cheaper, more durable, and more power-efficient than tubes. And it was not long after the invention of the computer that a new invention solved this problem.
In 1947, Shockley, a British scientist in the United States at Bell Labs, and his colleagues John Bardeen and Walter Bratton invented the semiconductor body tube. By replacing the tubes with tubes, computers are not only hundreds of times faster, but power consumption is expected to be reduced by two orders of magnitude, and the cost of operating and maintaining the computer is also much lower.
In 1956, Shockley quit his job at Bell Labs and founded his own Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in the San Francisco Bay Area. Using his fame, Shockley soon recruited a large number of young talents in the scientific and technological world, including Noyce, who later invented the integrated circuit, Moore's Law, and Kleiner, the founder of Kleiner Perkins. In order to ensure that the people he found were extremely smart, Shockley published the job advertisement in the form of ** in academic journals, and ordinary people could not read his advertisement at all. However, although Shockley was a scientific genius, he knew nothing about management and had no business vision. He focused his efforts on reducing the cost of quality control rather than developing new technologies.
On September 18, 1957, a day that the New York Times later called one of the 10 most important days in human history, eight of Shockley's young men submitted their resignations to him. Shockley was furious and called them the "Eight Traitors". Because in Shockley's view, their behavior is different from the general resignation, but the betrayal of the teacher by the student. Since then, the word "traitor" has become a positive word in Silicon Valley culture, representing a kind of entrepreneurial spirit that rebels against tradition.
In 1957, eight young people who left Shockley founded another semiconductor company, Fairchild Semiconductor, and one of the founders, Noyce, and Kilby of Texas Instruments co-invented the integrated circuit integrated circuit, which integrates many product tubes and the various complex circuits they make up into a semiconductor chip the size of a fingernail. This not only greatly improves the performance of the computer, but also reduces power consumption and cost.
Fairchild has created the world's semiconductor industry, it is like a hen that lays golden eggs, hatched a lot of semiconductor companies, so it is known as the "mother of the world's semiconductor companies" In the 60s of the 20th century, the leaders of the world's major semiconductor companies were surprised to find that 90% of the participants had worked in Fairchild, and most of these companies were concentrated in the San Francisco Bay Area. Since the semiconductor raw materials used in integrated circuits are mainly silicon, the San Francisco Bay Area, where the integrated circuit industry developed, was later known as Silicon Valley by the outside world.
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