welcome back everybody today we're going to talk about the microp which is truly the Dynamo that drives the digital Revolution we've talked about how the digital Revolution is based on the concept of onoff switches being used in circuits so that logic can be done through the way of turning a switch on off on off and doing logical algebra with it uh initially those switches were regular old click clack switches then electromagnetic switches like phone use and eventually you get the vacuum to which is just a switch but it does it electronically meaning it switches on and off the flow of electrons which means that it can happen thousands of times faster than a real mechanical switch then we talked about it Bell Labs how theyve invent a transistor which is just a tiny piece of semiconducting material like Silicon that has in it a little bit of doping so that or impurity so it becomes an onoff switch well the next Advance is called the microchip and that is simply etching thousands maybe millions of transistors on a tiny piece of semiconducting material like Silicon when they built an aniac it had 177,000 vacuum tubes pretty bad because they burn out like at the rate of one one or two per hour and then the transistor gets developed and in a small pocket device the size of a deck of cards you had six transistors to make a transistor radio or you can make a calculator with 12 transistors nowadays it's gotten smaller and better because those transistors are on microchips and they're 8.5 billion transistors in my iPhone all because of the invention of the integrated circuit which is pretty much driven by a wonderful guy named Bob noise he was from Iowa he was a total Golden Boy his father was a congregational Minister and used to travel from church to church in Iowa the family had to move quite often when his father would get assigned to a new church so Bob noise learned the art of making new friends but also keeping the old he had a high watted smile and from his father's church the congregationalist church he learned the idea of working together because congregationalists it's a denomination a Christian denomination that's very much reformist it was part of the Puritans and reformers who reformed the Church of England and got rid of the vestiges of the Catholic Church which mainly included hierarchy and all sorts of you know organization of from the pope to the arch Bishops and Cardinals all the way down to the Bishops and Priests well in the Congregational Church Church there's no altar there's no railing separating the congregation from the minister it's all done in unison and that was a type of plan that type of organizational structure that sort of open floor plan even that Bob noise eventually brings to Silicon Valley in particularly his company Intel he had an aversion for hierarchy and uh loved this notion of decentralized authority that you found in congregationalist churches he had a great uh you know smile infectious grin athletic body um he was a real heartthrob he also had something that Steve Jobs learned how to do which is the ability to stare at people without blinking he grew up with something that kids these days I don't think have as much as they should I used to have it when I was growing up and that's a workshop in the basement of your home where you could take things apart I remember taking apart radios and TVs soldering circuits nowadays most electronic devices are tightly sealed your iPhone your computer you can't really open them up but Bob no loved to work in his basement workshop and uh take things apart and learn how the innards of a computer the innards of a uh television set or radio work he also created a wonderful hang glider that used behind his car one dropped off the rof of a barn with it and he was one of those allaround great students when he goes to grenell college where his father is finally assigned to a church in grenell and there's a wonderful College in that beautiful town and Bob noise becomes the star there he derives every formula from scratch in his physics class he becomes on the swimming team a championship diver he plays doo in the college band he sings chorus he designs circuits for the model uh airplane club and even played in the uh soap the radio soap operas that they did but despite this he was well-liked partly I think as of that magical singing uh quality he loved getting people together he wasn't somebody who asserted himself as the leader he just sort of brought people together to do things once he volunteered to he procure the pig for a luau they took one from a neighborhood farmer and noise and a feeling of guilt admitted uh to the authorities the next day they had done that and he even got suspended from college for a while but that didn't hurt his career he ends up going to MIT uh partly because his college at grenell his teacher guy named Professor Gail had been able to procure a transistor he knew somebody at Bell labs and so he gets one of the first transistors they build in Bell labs and Bob noise becomes transformed by it he said it was one of those ideas that just jolts the guts out of you and so he ends up going to MIT so he can study electrical engineering and figuring it out he ends up uh Bob noise does working in Philadelphia for a while and then he gets a phone call from William Shockley shley was one of those three we talked about last lecture who invents the IST at Bell Labs along with uh Walter uh Bratton and John Bine but William Shak was really hard to get along with was paranoid eventually descends into pure Madness and uh racism uh but even back then he was somebody who nobody at Bell Labs ever wanted to work with again so when shockling moves back to his native California to Silicon Valley then really an apricot Valley uh has a yet become Silicon Valley he can't recruit any of the people from Bell lab so he just calls up cold the people he's been told are the best young engineers and of course he calls Robert noise who is so interested in the idea of the transistor that when the inventor of the transistor calls him up Bob noise not only accepts he gets in his car in Philadelphia and drives for two straight days to get to California to celebrate at shley semiconductor lab they were having a party for uh new recruits uh noise gets there it's 10 p.m. he's unshaven shley is doing a Tango with a rose in his mouth and this new young kid uh Bob noise comes in picks up the punch bowl drinks the entire bowl of spiked punch and then passes out and one of the engineers said this is going to be a whole lot of fun another person who shockly recruited was a guy named Gordon Moore you've probably heard of him because of Moore's Law Moore's law says that the um the processing power of a circuit the amount of transistors it has will double every two years and the price will come down in half every couple of years now that's not really a law it's something that has to be created by humans humans have to make this law into a real it and that's what happens when Bob noise and Gordon Moore they're the two of them Gordon Moore sitting down with the pencil in his hand uh become a team at shle semiconductor uh they work with Shockley for a while there shley they're celebrating the Nobel Prize that shy has just won shley sort of at the bottom right wearing those glasses but that was the last great celebration of choc semi conductor after he wins the Nobel Prize shakle becomes even more paranoid and what happens is Bob noise Fronton Center there with Gordon Moore on the far left become part of What's called the traitorous 8 one day they just simply announce they're leaving shl semiconductor and they're forming their own company called Fairchild semiconductor eventually it morphs into what is now known as Intel and one of the things they do is they take on what's called the tyrany of numbers because transistors are really cool and you can put a whole lot of them on a circuit board but at a certain point you solder a lot of transistors and other components onto a circuit board and the tyranny of numbers kicks in say you have 10,000 uh components that you're trying to put on a circuit board that may be a 100,000 wires that you have to S well something's going to go wrong if you do that so in two different places they invent a process for making it so that you can put a lot of transistors on one single piece of silicon and thus not have all that problem all the squiggly little wires that you have to solder together the way they did it at Fairchild with Gordon Moore and Bob noise there's Bob no holding an oversized model of what becomes the integrated circuit or microchip was because they faced the problem that there was a whole lot of impurities and that the uh transistors and circuits that they made were getting messed up so they created a shellac or a varnish that you could put on top of it but you could make little holes or etchings in that varnish cover and thus put the impurities that you wanted the doping onto the Silicon chip once they did that they and their patent lawyers figured out wow you can use this planer process to just ET whatever you want on a piece of silicon in tiny very accurate ways so you could put a lot of transistors and other components like uh capacitors or resistors on it likewise you have at Texas Instruments a wonderful guy named Jack Kilby and we mentioned him before because he's working with Pat hagy at this Texas Instruments an old oil field Exploration Place and they get a a license for the Bel labs to make transistors initially they make that first transistor radio but Jack kby when he starts working there has an idea that using different forms of impurities that you can etch into a silicon chip you can create every component you might want in a circuit you can create a transistor by doing a semiconducting piece of boron that switches on and off you can make a resistor so that the electrons won't flow you can make a capacitor so it would hold the charge and you can etch all these things into one little piece of silicon anyway both of them come together to create at Texas Instruments and then at what becomes Intel the notion of the microchip there was one other Innovation that comes along too and that's Venture Capital Arthur Rock friend of Gordon Moore and Bob noise from the East Coast comes West he's been a banker and he figures out I can raise money from investors and we become Angel Investors and that's how they helped start all these companies Silicon Valley Gordon Moore on the far right Bob noise in the middle but in order to create a great team you need different types of talent and on the far left there's Andy Grove so when they create Intel you got Bob no as a leader he hates confrontation sweetest guy in the world he builds a big open workspace as if it were a Congregational Church his desk is in the middle a beat up old desk anybody can walk up to him next to his desk is that of Gordon War the two leaders of the firm there's no hierarchy it's like a Congregational Church one point somebody says what's our org chart and noise just drew a little circle and said here's a dot in the middle that's you the org chart is here's everybody else when you want to connect with them just go talk to them that's great but it doesn't necessarily make for the most disciplined of organization so as part of the team they hire Andy Grove that impish looking guy on the far left Andy Grove grew up in Hungary he his family survives the Nazis then he as a young kid escapes the Communist by swimming across a river while he's chased by troops this is not growing up in a congregational ministers family in Iowa this is not sweet magical singing this becomes uh a background for a really driven tough disciplinarian guy and he writes a book called only the paranoid survive and that's the type of person too you need with somebody like a noise and a Moore you also need somebody who can impose discipline get the microchips out the door and that was the hierarchy at uh Intel eventually the invention of the Nobel Prize the invention of the microchip wins the Nobel Prize by that point Bob noise has died and there's Jack Kilby Jack Kilby and noise had been involved in a lawsuit between Texas Instruments and Intel about the patent for microchip but at one point uh Kilby and no just speak by phone said let's get the lawyers out of the way they sort of on a handshake agree to settle the cases cross-license their patents and they become very Cooperative so when Kilby gets the Nobel Prize the first thing he says after the king of Sweden gives it to him is uh if Bob noise were alive today he'd be standing here with me and the head of the Swedish Academy introducing uh Jack k kby for a speech says You Know Jack Kilby your invention of the microchip helped create the entire digital Revolution we're going through today and Kilby tells a story of the Beaver uh sitting at the foot of the Hoover Dam talking to a rabbit and the Beaver says to the rabbit no I didn't actually build it but it's based on my idea it was that type of collaborative spirit that becomes part of the digital Revolution thanks