Word: microchips
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...bugging him. Why, he wondered, couldn't all those tiny components--transistors, resistors, capacitors--in TI's electronic gadgetry be created out of a single block of material instead of separately wired parts? By September, he was ready to show his skeptical bosses just such an integrated circuit, or microchip. Last week Kilby's long-ago summer's tinkering won science's ultimate accolade: a Nobel Prize for Physics...
...French microchip engineer Jean-Pierre Gloton slips a thin rectangle of plastic into a port linked to a PC and types in a code. Voila! A personalized Web navigator blossoms on the screen. "With this, I can access various e-mail accounts and websites, trade stocks, buy goods and pay bills with a single click, using personal and banking information stored in a fraud-proof way," says Gloton, 56, as he removes the "smart card" that gives him these powers and returns it to his wallet. "This card contains a microchip that makes it a veritable minicomputer--with memory...
Traditional bank and credit cards are pretty dumb because they contain a magnetic strip rather than a microchip that has processing capability and holds a lot more information. One smart card, Gloton says, could function as an ID, store medical history and let us use all our bank and credit accounts. And someday it could be like cash, since everything from newsstands to vending machines will have card readers. If Gloton is right, our pockets won't be weighed down by a bunch of coins--unless we still need them for flipping...
...took a giant step out of the virtual world. After they hooked their computer to a $50,000 commercial plastic model-making machine, it produced actual offspring, not just a model on a computer screen. The only human intervention was installing the robot's little motor and computer-programmed microchip ("neurons...
...does a place seared by its past find its future? How does it move on, even as the nation as a whole is burying its history every minute with the invention of the next microchip or the launch of a new dotcom? "We can't worry about what's going on on Wall Street," says Mayor James Wilson. "We've got to worry about what's going on on Main Street." And right now, Cairo's Main Street is like an open scar left over from the day in 1967 when a black man was found hanged in jail...