EMULATION, MINIATURIZATION, AND MICROCHIPS

In 1964 IBM announced its System/360 line of mainframe computers.

During the next fi e years, these machines proved so successful that IBM’s sales more than doubled as the competition became increas-ingly obsolete. A cornerstone of the System/360’s success was its abil-ity to run the software applications of earlier, less powerful IBM com-puters without losses in processing speed. This capability was the res-ult of a small revolution in computer architecture called micropro-gramming. Using the speed they gained through microprogramming, IBM engineers avoided the common difficul y of earlier attempts to imitate or simulate the applications of obsolete models of computers.

This was known as the “Turing Tar Pit,”named for Alan M. Turing, one of the founders of computer science. The phrase signifie a theoretical possibility that is extremely difficul in practical terms. In order to dis-tinguish the System/360’s dynamic processing feature from earlier at-tempts to imitate or simulate the applications of obsolete computer models, Larry Moss of IBM called this new ability “emulation.”³

Talking up the advantages of emulation, IBM salesmen persuaded established customers to reinvest in System/360 hardware by pointing out that their earlier investments in IBM software, data storage, and personnel training would not become obsolete. Model 65 in this line was especially popular because of its ability to emulate applications for the 7070, the most popular large-capacity business computer.The 65 could run old applications up to ten times faster than the machines for which the programs had originally been designed. Realizing the suc-cess of this marketing strategy, IBM devoted extra resources to their lower-end models (Models 30 and 40), enabling them to emulate pro-grams previously designed for the 1401.⁴

The firs IBM System/360s were shipped in 1965, the same year that saw the debut of the PDP-8 minicomputer, direct ancestor of the per-sonal computer. Among the germanium crystal transistors of the PDP-8’s architecture were the firs integrated circuits ever used in computers. Integrated circuits were essential to the personal computer

revolution because they made compactness possible. Although the PDP-8 was still as large as an eight cubic foot box freezer, Kenneth Olsen, one of the founders of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), the company that manufactured the PDP-8, called his new product a minicomputer. He derived the term from two British imports that were then enjoying considerable success in the United States—the miniskirt, and the Morris Mini Minor, a small automobile whose in-genious design had emerged in response to the Suez Canal crisis of 1956, which reduced oil supplies to Britain.⁵

Olsen knew that Morris had directed the famous automobile design-er Alec Issigonis to create a car that was lightweight, fuel effici nt, and highly economical to operate. Similarly,compact integrated circuits would soon drive the computer revolution. The PDP-8 would fi l a market niche overlooked by IBM’s behemoth mainframes. The Mini Minor also had another feature that appealed to Olsen as a product model: it consistently outperformed most of its overblown British competitors. In Gordon Bell, the principal computer architect for the PDP series since the 1962 debut of the PDP-4, Olsen had found a design genius with the same visionary zeal as Alec Issigonis. Bell’s ar-chitecture took the opposite direction from that of mainframes. Bell believed that simpler machines with fewer instructions would consist-ently perform nearly as well as larger machines. The PDP-4 delivered over half the power of an IBM mainframe for about half the price ($65,000), and successive models consistently bettered that ratio.⁶

Because of the success of the compact PDP-8, DEC’s revenues went from $15 million to $135 million between 1965 and 1970. Although the company was still only a fraction of the size of IBM, it was expanding at an unprecedented rate. IBM—content with 200 percent growth dur-ing this period—missed the significan e of DEC’s remarkable expan-sion, its corporate model, and its target market. Since the PDP-8 sold for only $18,000 and in no way affected IBM’s market share, Big Blue executives were unthreatened by the new minicomputer. In 1970 DEC

was selling as many minicomputers as IBM sold mainframes (about 70,000). By 1971, seventy more companies had formed to manufacture minicomputers. DEC would soon grow into one of IBM’s major com-petitors, but last to realize this were the strangely complacent corpor-ate ostriches at IBM.⁷

IBM’s firs pioneering breakthrough had been the use of transistors instead of vacuum tubes in their early computers. But the company had since developed a byzantine corporate culture that stifle innova-tion. For one thing, they seemed obsessed by mainframes—hulking, large-capacity computers modeled on the UNIVAC whose complexity derived from the variety of processing speeds (and channels) they re-quired for different functions. The huge mainframes IBM manufac-tured had little need for the miniaturization made possible by integ-rated circuits. The cumbersome design of mainframes emphasized strict, centralized control of computer data—a business model that re-fle ted IBM’s own bureaucratic ideology but was appropriate only for the largest corporations.

IBM’s development of microprogramming in 1964 marked the com-pany’s last gasp of innovation. Although the sale of mainframes con-tinued to grow for more than a decade,the writing was on the wall for any computer engineer who cared to read it.Smallto medium-size companies that could not afford to lease or buy from IBM’s System/

360 line looked to the PDP series to fi l their needs. The limitations of the PDP-8—its inability to multitask, its short (12-bit) word length, and its relatively small (4K) memory—did not adversely affect these small users, who needed it for laboratory work, shipboard systems (es-pecially in submarines, where space restrictions were a priority), offi e management, and inventory.Small local bank branches began to use the machines to handle their daily transactions before they sent up-dated records to a central mainframe at headquarters. This practice, called distributed computing, legitimized DEC’s trend toward downs-izing its computer architecture. The trend was further encouraged by

the need for subminiaturized and lightweight circuits powerful enough to regulate the trajectories of Minuteman missiles and Apollo moon rockets.

In 1958 at Texas Instruments, Jack Kilby, a second-generation elec-trical engineer, was busy assessing a government-funded research pro-ject concerning subminiaturization using a device called the micro-module. By the end of World War II it had become clear that the fu-ture of aviation electronics depended on reducing the cost, size, and speed of electrical circuits while maintaining a high degree of reliabil-ity. A B-29 bomber had relied on nearly 1,000 vacuum tubes and tens of thousands of passive devices whose weight increased drag.⁸ Tran-sistors had presented an acceptable solution until 1957, when Sputnik I catapulted America into the space race and made smaller payloads a critical challenge. In 1958 the Pentagon eagerly began funding re-search into micro-modules because they promised a new level of sub-miniaturization by depositing printed electronic components on a ceramic wafer.

Although IBM would later use a similar device in the System/ 360s, Kilby thought that micro-modules were an inelegant and limited solu-tion to the problem of subminiaturizasolu-tion. He also suspected these devices would prove expensive to manufacture. Instead, Kilby wondered if he could simply put a variety of small components on a single wafer of semiconductor material and connect them by embed-ding fin gold wires in the crystal. Semiconductors used germanium or silicon because these natural materials neither conducted nor resisted electrical current. Kilby correctly imagined that the cost of a germani-um or silicon wafer would be offset by significant y lower manufactur-ing costs, since production, packagmanufactur-ing, and wirmanufactur-ing expenses would be limited to a single process. By the fall of 1958 Kilby had completed a working oscillator on a single wafer of germanium, and in 1959 he file a patent for what Texas Instruments called “the solid circuit.”⁹

From William Shockley, for whom he had worked at Shockley Semi-conductor, Robert Noyce had learned that the firs version of any in-novation, such as the transistor or integrated circuit, is usually a crude device that can be quickly improved. Noyce later described Kilby’s ap-proach as “brute force”—“taking a piece of semiconductor . . . shaping it . . . and then . . . still doing a lot of wiring.” His lab notebook entry from January 1959 records a scheme for creating a circuit similar to Kilby’s germanium invention but doing it in silicon. Using the planar process invented by Jean Hoerni,a Fairchild employee,Noyce com-pleted a design for a semiconductor circuit in 1959 that he called Mi-crologic. Noyce had already devoted a lot of thought to wiring and to what has been called the tyranny of numbers. Essentially, he recog-nized that wiring itself presented a problem to the success of submini-aturization because in addition to increasing the cost and weight of components, it also increased the distance that an electronic pulse had to travel: this in turn limited a given component’s speed.¹⁰

What Noyce would call the “monolithic idea”evolved as a solution to the limitations presented by wiring.He used Kilby’s idea of creating several components on a single wafer. To this he added Hoerni’s planar process which had originally been intended to seal each silicon wafer with a layer of silicon oxide in order to prevent impurities like gas, dust, and stray electric charges from incapacitating a working transistor. Noyce’s innovation also copied the basic idea of the micro-module. By printing a circuit’s wiring directly onto the inner surface of Hoerni’s silicon-oxide seal before applying it to the silicon wafer in which different components had already been created, Noyce com-pletely eliminated the need for additional wiring. The idea was mono-lithic because it combined three cutting-edge technologies into a single sealed device. Noyce applied for a patent a few months after Kilby file his own application, and it was granted in 1961.

Although Kilby’s patent was refused and he actually lost the rights to his invention, by 1964 Texas Instruments and Fairchild reached an

accommodation in which both men were credited for co-inventing the integrated circuit. By that time, the use of integrated circuits (ICs) was becoming pervasive. Still, IBM’s administrators wanted nothing to do with them.As late as 1963 an internal memo answered the concerns of some young IBM engineers who worried that the solid-circuit technology (micro-modules) used in the designs and prototypes for the System/360 series would soon become obsolete. The memo stated that “monolithics” would not be a “competitive threat either now or in the next fi e years.” Twelve months later, however, another memo noted that ICs had made rapid progress. This second memo also claimed that IBM was several months behind in this emerging techno-logy and would require “six months to a year to catch up.” Nonethe-less, although ICs had become cheaper and more readily available, IBM continued to manufacture their System/360s using ceramic micro-module circuitry.¹¹

Despite IBM’s indifference, integrated circuits gained considerable acceptance elsewhere. In 1962 North American Aviation’s Autonetics division won a lavish contract for the guidance system of a new inter-continental ballistic missile, the Minuteman II. Autonetics decided to take advantage of the subminiature ICs. The guidance system of the Minuteman I had contained over 15,000 discrete circuits. By the time of its firs launch in 1964, the weight, size, and complexity of Minute-man II’s guidance computer had been reduced to 4,000 discrete and roughly 2,000 integrated circuits. Between 1962 and 1965, the Pentagon signed electronics contracts totaling $24 million dollars. The half million chips sold in 1963 quadrupled every year until 1966. By that time, Autonetics was producing six new Minuteman II missiles weekly and calling for over 4,000 circuits a week from Texas Instru-ments, Westinghouse,and RCA.The Minuteman II program had be-come America’s top consumer of integrated circuits.¹²

NASA was now paying attention, too. It had purchased integrated circuits since 1959 when Texas Instruments firs made them available.

In 1961 NASA charged its internal instrumentation lab with responsib-ility for the Apollo guidance system. Their administrator recognized that integrated circuitry was ideal for the Apollo guidance computer, of which seventy-fi e were built, each requiring about 4,000 ICs. These integrated circuits now came from several companies, including Texas Instruments, Philco-Ford, and Fairchild Semiconductor. Before Apollo, Robert Noyce at Fairchild had eschewed any involvement in military contracts like the Minuteman. The Apollo moon mission was a completely different matter, however.¹³NASA did not share the mil-itary culture that, Noyce felt, stifle innovation, promoted bad science, and championed limited solutions like the micromodule. NASA, he felt, was a unique scientifi enterprise. Together, Noyce and Fairchild Semiconductor jumped eagerly into the Apollo moon mission.

As a result of joint patronage by the Minuteman and Apollo pro-grams, semiconductor manufacturers dropped the price of their integ-rated circuits from $120 per chip to about $25 between 1961 and 1971.

During this decade, the number of circuits that could be crammed onto a single chip increased dramatically.

This steady increase in the maximum number of circuits on a single chip had followed a predictable curve since 1959. The firs person to notice this regularity was Gordon Moore, director of research at Fairchild Semiconductor and one of its eight co-founders (including Noyce). The Moore-Noyce friendship had begun when they met as young engineers working at Shockley Semiconductor Industries. To-gether with six of their fellows, Noyce and Moore left Shockley in 1957 over an ongoing management dispute. These eight men found, as had John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, inventors of the firs transistor, that Shockley was a less than ideal supervisor. Moore and Noyce moved again in 1968 when they became dissatisfie with Fairchild Camera and Instrument, their parent f rm. This time they co-founded Intel, an independent semiconductor manufacturer that would be-come the industry leader for decades.

In October 1965 Moore published observations that would later be-come known as Moore’s Law, and still later as Moore’s First Law.

Moore pointed out that the level of an integrated circuit’s complexity had increased in relation to its minimum cost at “a rate of roughly a factor of two per year. Certainly, over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not increase. Over the longer term the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,500. I believe that such a large circuit can be built on a single wafer.”¹⁴

Although Moore’s Law was intended to emphasize the increasing power and the diminishing costs of integrated circuits, it also provided an index to the steady rate of technological obsolescence created by ICs. In 1965 chips were doubling their capacity and lowering their price every year,so it did not take very long at all to render obsolete any given chip or the power, compactness, and cost of the device that used it. In other words, any electronic device that contained a micro-chip was death-dated by the time it left the assembly line. These devices were truly self-consuming artifacts, since their desirability di-minished automatically. Every year, smaller and smaller electronic devices became available for less and less cost, and these devices be-came at least twice as capacious and twice as fast as their immediate predecessor, effectively quadrupling the value of each generation of chip.¹⁵

The speed at which this technological obsolescence occurred became obvious during Apollo’s last fli ht in 1975, when American astronauts aboard this joint Apollo-Soyuz docking mission carried with them pro-grammable HP-65 pocket calculators that were several times more powerful than the capsule’s inboard computer designed less than a decade before.¹⁶

But Moore’s Law is only part of the much bigger picture of the his-tory of computing, and the forces driving the acceleration of obsoles-cence and e-waste are far older than integrated circuits. In 1999 Ray-mond Kurzweil, winner of the prestigious National Medal of Techno-logy, observed that Moore’s Law is actually “the fift paradigm to con-tinue the now one-century-long exponential growth of computing.”

Kurzweil pointed out that an

Exponential Law of Computing has held true for a least a century, from the mechanical card-based electrical computing technology used in the 1890 US census, to the relay-based computers that cracked the Nazi Enigma code, to the vacuum-tube-based com-puters of the 1950s, to the transistor-based machines of the 1960s, and to all of the generations of integrated circuits of the past four decades. Computers are about one hundred million times more powerful for the same unit cost than they were a half century ago.If the automobile industry had made as much pro-gress in the past fif y years, a car today would cost a hundredth of a cent and go faster than the speed of light.

(In June 2000, when Intel introduced a single-chip processor contain-ing 150 million transistors, Moore would give the automobile analogy an ecological twist, remarking that if automobiles had improved at the same rate computers did, we would all be driving cars that got 150,000 miles to the gallon.)¹⁷

When Moore made his original observations in 1965, the cost of continuously replacing obsolete hardware was ameliorated by radical reductions in the price of newer, more powerful models. Technological obsolescence—the same market force that Walter Dorwin Teague had approvingly referred to as “natural obsolescence”in 1960—was driving the repetitive consumption of a variety of new products that now in-cluded digital watches, calculators, computers, and computer soft-ware. By 1965 the ground was prepared for America’s e-waste crisis.

The earliest e-waste product that contained a microchip was the disposable electronic calculator.