Word: silicon
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Hewlett-Packard. Though it failed to recognize the potential of Wozniak's proposal for a personal computer, Hewlett-Packard is highly regarded in Silicon Valley for fostering innovation. In 1982 Engineer Charles House was given a medal for "extraordinary contempt and defiance beyond the normal call of engineering duty." He had ignored an order from Founder David Packard to stop working on a type of high-quality video monitor. Despite the rebuke, House pressed ahead and succeeded in developing the monitor, which has been used to track NASA's manned moon landings and also in heart transplants. Although there were...
Advanced technology is not the province of just a few way-out industries. Zysman, who studies the exotic fields from the outskirts of California's Silicon Valley, maintains that the frontier industries are changing the way other, more commonplace businesses are conducted. These technologies, he says, are "transforming the whole economy." Textiles and apparel making, for example, are usually considered labor-intensive, backward industries. But instead of being displaced by that technology, contends Zysman, textile manufacturing is part of the new industrial revolution. Cloth can be cut by laser beams, and looms are driven by computers programmed, ironically...
Wald refuted the claim that silicon, not carbon, could be the basis of other life. Silicon cannot form chemical double bonds, and therefore, forms crystalline chains instead of discreet molecules...
...Actors in the video portray bankers who deliver admonitions like "If the crooks don't get you, your friends will." The film, which costs $375, has so far been shown to more than 6,000 bankers. Says Darby: "There are more changes going on in banking than in Silicon Valley. There is a tremendous amount of confusion out there...
...kids are finally getting their due. In a new book called Hackers (Doubleday; $17.95), Writer Steven Levy argues that these "science-mad people" are the true heroes of the computer revolution. He traces the history of hackers from M.I.T.'s Tech Model Railroad Club, their first mecca, to Silicon Valley's Homebrew Computer Club, an early microcomputer gathering spot, to a video-game factory in Coarsegold, Calif. Through it all he discerns a common thread: the unspoken assumption among crack computer programmers and engineers that they could straighten out the world by dint of their intelligence if they...