Archive: September, 2008

The dawn of today’s society rose 50 years ago today.

On September 12, 1958, John Kilby demonstrated the first working integrated circuit in his lab at Texas Instruments. Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Integrated Circuit, (the chips that run much of our modern infrastructure).

Kilby, who was awarded the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics for developing the chip, solved the problem that stood in the way of computer scientists since the invention of the transistor a decade earlier. Electronics are made up of numerous components including resistors, transistors, diodes and capacitors. The problem is, no matter how small the individual components were, they still needed to be connected to form an electronic circuit.

Kilby’s inspiration came while working with semi-conductors with Texas Instruments. He figured resistors, capacitors, diodes and transistors could be made from the same materials as semi-conductors and combined on a single chip, the integrated circuit.

Kilby ended up sharing credit for the discovery of the integrated circuit with Robert Noyce, the founder of Intel. Working independently of Kilby, Noyce was trying to build an integrated circuit for Fairchild Semiconductor at the same time Kilby was developing his at Texas Instruments. Noyce choose silicone as his base material, an innovation that resulted in the hundreds of billions of chips running our world today.

United Airlines stocks plunged Monday after news the air carrier was filing for bankruptcy protection was published on the front page of Google News. United shares fell over 75% in a confused six minute period during which trading in the stock was halted so market regulators could figure out what the heck was going on.

When the source of the story was discovered, the red lights flashing on Wall St. paled in comparison to the embarrassed red faces found in Mountain View CA and Broward FL, and the angry red faces of United Airlines lawyers. The run on United Airlines shares was caused by a series of malfunctions, some human and some algorithmic.

In reality, United Airlines was not getting ready to file for bankruptcy protection. United had already done that. Six years ago. In short, the fiasco was caused by a very big error which was caused by a series of systemic mistakes.

Somehow, a real story (written in 2002) about United Airlines post 9-11 financial issues from the Chicago Tribune was reprinted late Saturday (September 6) in the South Florida Sun Sentinel. From there, it was picked up by two extremely important news sources, Bloomberg and Google News, both of which ran it as if it were a current article.