Word: silicon
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...learning, are solitary activities that do not seem solitary. The computer toys are starting to teach their owners not only a new kind of thinking, but what may amount to a strange new way of socializing. Says J. Fred Bucy, president of Texas Instruments, the biggest producer of the silicon chips that are the brains of the little monsters, "I think schoolteachers in the next decade are going to see a new kind of animal walking through their doors...
Presumably the computer children will retain some links with society. In any case, if the silicon-chip industry can gear up its production to meet the insatiable demands of the toymakers, the computer-synthesized siren songs heard by flesh-and-blood members of the population are sure to become even more beguiling...
...spots in the otherwise gloomy innovation picture. Last year's reduction in the capital gains tax from 49% to 28% resulted in a flood of new money looking for risky but promising investments. Boston's Route 128 complex of small, high-technology firms and California's Silicon Valley are awash with funds...
...fiber optics -systems that carry information in rays of light traveling through slender glass fibers rather than in electric currents moving through bulky cables. IBM's research budget this year will be $1.25 billion, and the company has become the first to master the mass production of a silicon memory chip small enough to pass through the eye of a needle yet able to store 64,000 bits of information. Bell & Howell's Frey maintains it is a myth that only small firms can be innovative, adding that only large corporations have the capital and the distribution network...
Many of the new millionaires come from the ranks of entrepreneurs, especially those who founded technological businesses, such as computer software firms and makers of silicon chips used in electronic microcircuitry. These new rich seem to have gravitated to technological enclaves like Southern California's Silicon Valley and Massachusetts' Route 128. Some entrepreneurs in less advanced fields achieved instant millionaire status by selling out to larger firms and moving to Sunbelt states to enjoy their riches. Skilled professionals in fields such as neurosurgery and the law now make enough in fees to enable them to enter the millionaire...