Word: microchip
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...pundits tell us that the central division in our transnational world is between the "slow" cultures of the plow and the "fast" ones of the microchip, the gap between them accelerating at an unprecedented rate. But what is more of a vexation in our modern times--a temporal Tower of Babel, as you could call it--is that everything's mixed up: fast and slow are present in every country, often, and in every household. Ancient cultures, as in India and China, are eager to invite the future to come to stay, so long as it doesn't interfere with...
...information technology itself: the telegraph (Charles Wheatstone and Samuel F.B. Morse, 1837); color photography (Charles Cros and Louis Ducos du Hauron, 1868); the phonograph (Charles Cros--again!--and Thomas Edison, 1877); the telephone (Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell, 1876)--and so on, all the way up to the microchip (Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce...
...seen as our filtration of mysticism through a more modern lens, with the paranoia of government conspiracy and the growing fears associated with the introduction of technology such as the Internet serving as appropriate '90s touches. Minotaurs and demons and witches have been replaced by alien cloning and microchip implants, but the underlying principles are the same...
...later got a Ph.D. in computer science and spent 10 years failing at various academic careers and a couple of marriages before reinventing himself and heading off to Stanford. There, he and his students designed a microchip he called the Geometry Engine, which allowed computers to visualize objects in 3-D. Fruitlessly, he tried to license the thing to IBM, DEC and Hewlett-Packard, before starting Silicon Graphics to sell workstations with the chip. That's where Clark honed his distaste for venture capitalists, whom he saw as stealing his enterprise and putting it in the hands of managers. Clark...
...dead and at least 100,000 homeless and toppled some 6,000 buildings. Relief agencies from around the world, including the U.S., Turkey and Russia, mobilized to help. In financial centers, stocks took a pounding of their own as investors fretted about what the shutdown of Taiwan's microchip industry would mean to the always jumpy electronics sector...