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Title: The Chip : How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution by T.R. Reid ISBN: 0-375-75828-3 Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks Pub. Date: 09 October, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.3 (10 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: An exciting book for an exciting subject
Comment: At the very outset of the review I must warn that I am a techie so my review is biased. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. It conveys the excitement of the really exciting invention made. The invention has revolutionized the electronic industry.
Noyce and Kilby are a couple of the few people who have revolutionized our lives but little mention is made of them. Instead our media and culture has ignored these people totally apart from a passing mention or a brief media hype. I would encourage everyone to read this book for the inspiration it provides.
Rating: 5
Summary: It takes a polymath to know a polymath
Comment: I am referring to Mr. T. R. Reid. His book, The Chip, is a tour de force that takes the reader on a journey at once historical and cerebral-, even spiritual. This absorbing account of the mircoelectronics revolution integrates (among other subjects): the biographies of Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce, the counting systems of ancient Babylonians and Myans, the arcane ideas of 19th century mathematician George Boole, solid state physics, statistics, politics, patent law, and an Alice story. Reid interconnects people and ideas from varied disciplines as elegantly as the silcon chip integrates the varied components of the electronic circuit. So The Chip is both an exposition of a type of physical integration and itself a demonstration of another, a more general type of the thing it describes.
Readers from diverse backgrounds should be stimulated on one or more levels by The Chip. I sincerely hope the book could find its way on the required reading list of High Schools across the country. For this book is about America and for America, weaving together larger themes of individualism, optimism, innovation, amelioration, and, most of all, wonder. It is at once guidebook and soul food, leading, nurturing, sustaining..., lighting up the fires of the creative imagination. So follow this torchlight of a review and pass into the rich and dazzling realm of The Chip.
Rating: 2
Summary: how to turn an invention into a boxing match
Comment: The writing is reasonably engaging and does its best to attract general interest to a technical subject. However the tactics with which it does so are more National Enquirer than New York Times. The author decides to choose sides in the debate over who invented the microchip, and delivers pages of invective to support his position. The industry, in contrast, recognized both Kilby and Noyce as inventors and paid royalties to both companies they worked for. In short, the author tries to retroactively arrange a boxing match between the inventors, while the co-inventors in reality cordially shook hands and agreed to split the profits. The intensely partisan presentation of the story in this book is a gross offense to the characters of the inventors.
In addition, the text is littered with errors. "A diode is a dam that blocks current under some conditions and opens it to let electricity flow when the conditions change" is a mighty vague way to say that diodes let current flow one direction and not the reverse. "Materials that have proven the best insulators are indeed those with eight outer electrons" flat out does not parse. Does the material have eight electrons? Is he trying to say that noble gases are the best insulators? "Elements with three or fewer outer electrons are conductors, and those with five or more are insulators" would come as a surprise to metals such as arsenic, antimony or selenium. "Shockley had a reputation for getting the most out of the people who worked for him". I won't even touch that one. "The process that eventually proved best - the process still used today in semiconductor manufacture - was a Bell Labs discovery called diffusion" has so many inaccuracies in one sentence it's hard to know where to start. One might as well say "Plumbing is a process that depends on leakage, a phenomenon invented by the Greeks."
For all that, the book help personalize and make memorable the birth of the silicon chip. It occasionally does a very effective job of distilling the essence of a discovery. If taken with a grain of salt as a journalist's account of an engineering breakthrough, it will leave some lasting memories.
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