Transistor Quotes

The crowd quieted as a whole, but more than one creature cursed under his breath, "Not Regin." A drunk hunched over the bar muttered, "That glowing one made me eat a transistor radio once.

A picnic. Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. Cars drive off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around... Rags, burnt-out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind... And of course, the usual mess—apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody’s handkerchief, somebody’s penknife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow.

And here is our girl, looking-- If possible, worse than before. (You thought this was Cinderella transistorized?)

It's called the Infinity Effect.

Mankind was on the moon in the 1960s, Jon. That was half a century ago. Nuclear power. The transistor. The laser. All existed even back then. Do you really think the pinnacle of innovation since that time is Facebook?

Have you noticed, now, the way people talk so loudly in snackbars and cinemas, how the shelved back gardens shudder with prodigies of talentlessness, drummers, penny-whistlers, vying transistors, the way you see and hear the curses and sign-language of high sexual drama at the bus-stops under ghosts of clouds, how life has come out of doors? And in the soaked pubs the old-timers wince and weather the canned rock. We talk louder to make ourselves heard. We will all be screamers soon.

She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time she’d opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There’d seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding.

A first-rate college library with a comfortable campus around it is a fine milieu for a writer. There is, of course, the problem of educating the young. I remember how once, between terms, not at Cornell, a student brought a transistor set with him into the reading room. He managed to state that one, he was playing “classical” music; that two, he was doing it “softly”; and that three, “there were not many readers around in summer.” I was there, a one-man multitude.

The second simplest algorithm is: combine two bits. Claude Shannon, better known as the father of information theory, was the first to realize that what transistors are doing, as they switch on and off in response to other transistors, is reasoning. (That was his master’s thesis at MIT—the most important master’s thesis of all time.)

If you remove a single transistor in the digital computer’s central processor, the computer will fail.

De vez en cuando, la música de un transistor rompe de modo efímero la densidad casi física de aquel híbrido de alienación, torpor y monotonía.

No es necesario saber leer y escribir para escuchar la radio de transistores o mirar la televisión y recibir el cotidiano mensaje que enseña a aceptar el dominio del más fuerte y a confundir la personalidad con un automóvil, la dignidad con un cigarrillo y la felicidad con una salchicha.

Dickens has not seen it all. The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: life is their only weapon against life, life is all that they have. This is why the dispossessed and starving will never be convinced (though some may be coerced) by the population-control programs of the civilized. I have watched the dispossessed and starving laboring in the fields which others own, with their transistor radios at their ear, all day long: so they learn, for example, along with equally weighty matters, that the pope, one of the heads of the civilized world, forbids to the civilized that abortion which is being, literally, forced on them, the wretched. The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their ‘vital interests’ are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the ‘sanctity’ of human life, or the ‘conscience’ of the civilized world. There is a ‘sanctity’ involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it. Dreadful indeed it is to see a starving child, but the answer to that is not to prevent the child’s arrival but to restructure the world so that the child can live in it: so that the ‘vital interest’ of the world becomes nothing less than the life of the child. However—I could not have said any of this then, nor is so absurd a notion about to engulf the world now. But we were all starving children, after all, and none of our fathers, even at their most embittered and enraged, had ever suggested that we ‘die out.’ It was not we who were supposed to die out: this was, of all notions, the most forbidden, and we learned this from the cradle. Every trial, every beating, every drop of blood, every tear, were meant to be used by us for a day that was coming—for a day that was certainly coming, absolutely certainly, certainly coming: not for us, perhaps, but for our children. The children of the despised and rejected are menaced from the moment they stir in the womb, and are therefore sacred in a way that the children of the saved are not. And the children know it, which is how they manage to raise their children, and why they will not be persuaded—by their children’s murderers, after all—to cease having children.

Is a mind a complicated kind of abstract pattern that develops in an underlying physical substrate, such as a vast network of nerve cells? If so, could something else be substituted for the nerve cells – something such as ants, giving rise to an ant colony that thinks as a whole and has an identity – that is to say, a self? Or could something else be substituted for the tiny nerve cells, such as millions of small computational units made of arrays of transistors, giving rise to an artificial neural network with a conscious mind? Or could software simulating such richly interconnected computational units be substituted, giving rise to a conventional computer (necessarily a far faster and more capacious one than we have ever seen) endowed with a mind and a soul and free will?

Seems odd that a species could invent interstellar travel before inventing the transistor, but hey, Earth invented nuclear power, television, and even did several space launches before the transistor.

By the 1980's and 1990's, Moore's Law had emerged as the underlying assumption that governed almost everything in the Valley, from technology to business, education, and even culture. The "law" said the number of transistors would double every couple of years. It dictated that nothing stays the same for more than a moment; no technology is safe from its successor; costs fall and computing power increases not at a constant rate but exponentially: If you're not running on what became known as " Internet time," you're falling behind.

Le equazioni della meccanica quantistica e le loro conseguenze vengono usate quotidianamente da fisici, ingegneri, chimici e biologi, nei campi più svariati. Sono utilissime per tutta la tecnologia contemporanea. Non ci sarebbero i transistor senza la meccanica quantistica. Eppure restano misteriose: non descrivono cosa succede a un sistema fisico, ma solo come un sistema fisico viene percepito da un altro sistema fisico. Che significa? Significa che la realtà essenziale di un sistema è indescrivibile? Significa solo che manca un pezzo alla storia? O significa, come a me sembra, che dobbiamo accettare l’idea che la realtà sia solo interazione?

There was little work left of a routine, mechanical nature. Men’s minds were too valuable to waste on tasks that a few thousand transistors, some photo-electric cells, and a cubic meter of printed circuits could perform.

Yet the laboriously sought musical epiphany rarely compares to the unsought, even unwanted tune whose ambush is violent and sudden: the song the cab driver was tuned to, the song rumbling from the speaker wedged against the fire-escape railing, the song tingling from the transistor on the beach blanket. To locate those songs again can become, with age, something like a religious quest, as suggested by the frequent use of the phrase "Holy Grail" to describe hard-to-find tracks. The collector is haunted by the knowledge that somewhere on the planet an intact chunk of his past still exists, uncorrupted by time or circumstance.

To create silicon chips, UV light is passed through a template that contains the blueprint for all the circuits on a chip. The UV light and a series of chemical reactions creates a pattern that is etched onto a silicon wafer, creating transistors on the chip.

En 1947, la pile électrique et le transistor, innovations capitales, rendent portables la radio et le tourne-disque. Révolution majeure, car elles permettent au jeunes de danser hors des bals, donc hors de la présence des parents, libérant la sexualité, ouvrant à toutes nouvelles musiques, du jazz au rock, annonçant l'entrée des jeunes dans l'univers de la consommation, du désir, de la révolte.

Brian knows the affair is wrong. He's known from the moment Wendy first undressed in his office. But with her hot, wet tongue in his ear, and her taut, pink nipples straining against his starched white shirt, and with Mick Jagger's strident voice squawking about satisfaction on the tiny transistor radio, Brian's body refuses to obey. Instead of shoving Wendy out the door, he shoves her onto the unmade bed.

A picnic. Imagine: a forest, a country road, a meadow. A car pulls off the road into the meadow and unloads young men, bottles, picnic baskets, girls, transistor radios, cameras … A fire is lit, tents are pitched, music is played. And in the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that were watching the whole night in horror crawl out of their shelters. And what do they see? An oil spill, a gasoline puddle, old spark plugs and oil filters strewn about … Scattered rags, burnt-out bulbs, someone has dropped a monkey wrench. The wheels have tracked mud from some godforsaken swamp … and, of course, there are the remains of the campfire, apple cores, candy wrappers, tins, bottles, someone’s handkerchief, someone’s penknife, old ragged newspapers, coins, wilted flowers from another meadow …” “I get it,” said Noonan. “A roadside picnic.

Didn't they understand that for some people the opera, the drama, the ballet, were only boring, and yet a peepshow on Market Street was art? They want to make everything gray and tasteful. Don't they understand how awful good taste seems to people who don't have it? Ha, what do they care about people with bad taste! Nothing. But I do. I love them. They wear cheap perfume and carry transistor radios. They buy plastic dog turds and painted turtles and pennants and signs that say, "I don't swim in your toilet, so please don't pee in my pool!" and they buy smelly popcorn and eat it on the street and go to bad movies and stand here in doorways sneaking nips of whiskey just like I'm doing, and they're all so nice.

It has today occurred to me that an amplifier using semiconductors rather than vacuum is in principle possible. [Laboratory notebook, 29 Dec 1939.]

Earth invented nuclear power, television, and even did several space launches before the transistor.

performance” would double every eighteen months because of the increased power as well as the increased numbers of transistors that would be put onto a microchip.

Microchip manufactures, similarly, cannot make their transistors too thin, or the performance of these devices will suffer from electon leakage due to tunneling effects.

processors from the 1980s and processors from today have a roughly similar ratio of transistors to MIPS—about 30 transistors per instruction per second, give or take an order of magnitude.

The parents of today who complain about the iPods and cell phones that are soldered onto the ears of teenagers forget that their own parents made the same complaint about them and their transistor radios.

And I couldn't take my eyes off Pete. He ate dinner like he always did, in three or four huge, whoofing bites, before heading back out front to his cone of warmth, his coffee, his cigarettes, and ghostly tunes piping from his little transistor radio. And most important, to whatever thoughts drowned out the voices of his own family saying "hello" and "happy holidays." I watched him because I couldn't believe that could be anyone's comfortable horizon. A tiny porch on a dark corner near a highway. We lucked out living on a planet made thrilling by billions of years of chance, catastrophe, miracles, and disaster, and he'd rejected it. You're offered the world every morning when you open your eyes. I was beginning to see Pete as a representative of all the people who shut that out, through cynicism, religion, fear, greed, or ritual.

There was little work left of a routine, mechanical nature. Men’s minds were too valuable to waste on tasks that a few thousand transistors, some photo-electric cells, and a cubic meter of printed circuits could perform. There were factories that ran for weeks without being visited by a single human being. Men were needed for trouble-shooting, for making decisions, for planning new enterprises. The robots did the rest.

What a wonderful world that was, and how remote it seems now. It is a challenge to believe that there was ever a time that airline food was exciting, when stewardesses were happy to see you, when flying was such an occasion that you wore your finest clothes. I grew up in a world in which everything was like that: shopping malls, TV dinners, TV itself, supermarkets, freeways, air conditioning, drive-in movies, 3D movies, transistor radios, backyard barbecues, air travel as a commonplace—all were brand-new and marvelously exciting. It is amazing we didn’t choke to death on all the novelty and wonder in our lives. I remember once my father brought home a device that you plugged in and, with an enormous amount of noise and energy, it turned ice cubes into shaved ice, and we got excited about that. We were idiots really, but awfully happy, too. —

When computers were vast systems of transistors and valves which needed to be coaxed into action, it was women who turned them on. When computers became the miniaturized circuits of silicon chips, it was women who assembled them . . . when computers were virtually real machines, women wrote the software on which they ran. And when computer was a term applied to flesh and blood workers, the bodies which composed them were female.

A paper by Gordon Moore (of Moore’s law fame) gives figures for the total number of transistors manufactured per year since the 1950s. It looks something like this: Using our ratio, we can convert the number of transistors to a total amount of computing power. This tells us that a typical modern laptop, which has a benchmark score in the tens of thousands of MIPS, has more computing power than existed in the entire world in 1965.

In the buses all night she listened to transistor radios playing songs in the lower stretches of the Top 200, that would never become popular, whose melodies and lyrics would perish as if they had never been sung. A Mexican girl, trying to hear one of these through snarling static from the bus’s motor, hummed along as if she would remember it always, tracing post horns and hearts with a fingernail, in the haze of her breath on the window.

the inventors of the transistor at Bell Labs in New Jersey, moved out to Mountain View and, in 1956, started a company to build transistors using silicon rather than the more expensive germanium that was then commonly used. But

The difference between the Platonic theory and the morphic-resonance hypothesis can be illustrated by analogy with a television set. The pictures on the screen depend on the material components of the set and the energy that powers it, and also on the invisible transmissions it receives through the electromagnetic field. A sceptic who rejected the idea of invisible influences might try to explain everything about the pictures and sounds in terms of the components of the set – the wires, transistors, and so on – and the electrical interactions between them. Through careful research he would find that damaging or removing some of these components affected the pictures or sounds the set produced, and did so in a repeatable, predictable way. This discovery would reinforce his materialist belief. He would be unable to explain exactly how the set produced the pictures and sounds, but he would hope that a more detailed analysis of the components and more complex mathematical models of their interactions would eventually provide the answer. Some mutations in the components – for example, by a defect in some of the transistors – affect the pictures by changing their colours or distorting their shapes; while mutations of components in the tuning circuit cause the set to jump from one channel to another, leading to a completely different set of sounds and pictures. But this does not prove that the evening news report is produced by interactions among the TV set’s components. Likewise, genetic mutations may affect an animal’s form and behaviour, but this does not prove that form and behaviour are programmed in the genes. They are inherited by morphic resonance, an invisible influence on the organism coming from outside it, just as TV sets are resonantly tuned to transmissions that originate elsewhere.

Hands folded under my chin, I drifted. A bruise-colored cloud hung over Koko Head. A transistor radio twanged on a seawall where a Hawaiian family picnicked on the sand. The sun-warmed shallow water had a strange boiled-vegetable taste. The moment was immense, still, glittering, mundane. I tried to fix each of its parts in memory. I did not consider, even passingly, that I had a choice when it came to surfing. My enchantment would take me where it would.

The exponential growth of this industry was correlated with the phenomenon famously discovered by Moore, who in 1965 drew a graph of the speed of integrated circuits, based on the number of transistors that could be placed on a chip, and showed that it doubled about every two years, a trajectory that could be expected to continue. This was reaffirmed in 1971, when Intel was able to etch a complete central processing unit onto one chip, the Intel 4004, which was dubbed a “microprocessor.” Moore’s Law has held generally true to this day, and its reliable projection of performance to price allowed two generations of young entrepreneurs, including Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, to create cost projections for their forward-leaning products.

De hecho, se estableció una relación simbiótica entre la aparición de la radio de transistores y la irrupción del rock and roll. La primera grabación comercial de Elvis Presley, «That’s All Right», salió a la venta al mismo tiempo que la radio Regency.

There are now more transistors at work on this planet (some 15 quintillion, or 15,000,000,000,000,000,000) than there are leaves on all the trees in the world. In 2015, the four major chip-making firms were making 14 trillion transistors every single second.

Musical intelligence. Agent attends a concert and receives his instructions. Information and directives in and out through street singers, musical broadcasts, jukeboxes, records, high school bands, whistling boys, cabaret performers, singing waiters, transistor radios.

You see,” he said, “this little gadget is only a simple-minded cousin of Karl’s—and look what it’s done already. All these machines are beginning to make us look fools. Before long they’ll start to disobey us without any Milquetoast interfering with their circuits. And then they’ll start ordering us about—they’re logical, after all, and won’t stand any nonsense.” He sighed. “When that happens, there won’t be a thing we can do about it. We’ll just have to say to the dinosaurs: ‘Move over a bit—here comes homo sap!’ And the transistor shall inherit the earth.

Let us consider Elfland as a great national park, a vast and beautiful place where a person goes by himself, on foot, to get in touch with reality in a special, private, profound fashion. But what happens when it is considered merely as a place to "get away to"? Well, you know what has happened to Yosemite. Everybody comes, not with an ax and a box of matches, but in a trailer with a motorbike on the back and a motorboat on top and a butane stove, five aluminum folding chairs, and a transistor radio on the inside. They arrive totally encapsulated in a secondhand reality. And then they move on to Yellowstone, and it's just the same there, all trailers and transistors. They go from park to park, but they never really go anywhere; except when one of them who thinks that even the wildlife isn't real gets chewed up by a genuine, firsthand bear. The same sort of thing seems to be happening to Elfland, lately.

I guess you’re familiar with Moore’s Law? This states that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit—which basically means memory size and processing speed—will double every eighteen months, and costs will halve. Moore’s Law has held with amazing consistency since 1965, and it still holds.

Michelangelo said that all he did was see the statue inside the block of marble and carve away the excess stone until the statue was revealed. Likewise, an algorithm carves away the excess transistors in the computer until the intended function is revealed, whether it’s an airliner’s autopilot or a new Pixar movie. An

It is impossible to describe the shock of return. I recall that I stood for the longest time staring at a neatly painted yellow line on a neatly formed cement curb. Yellow yellow line line. I pondered the human industry, the paint, the cement truck and concrete forms, all the resources that had gone into that one curb. For what? I could not quite think of the answer. So that no car would park there? Are there so many cars that America must be divided into places with and places without them? Was it always so, or did they multiply vastly, along with telephones and new shoes and transistor radios and cellophane-wrapped tomatoes, in our absence?

It never was about the musician or the instrument - it was about the laser notes in a hall of mirrors, the music itself. It was going to change the world for the better and it has. Maybe not as fast or as much as we wanted, but it has and it still will. Whether your name is Mozart, or Django Reinhardt, or Robert Johnson, or Jimi Hendrix, or whoever is next; who you are doesn't matter so long as you can open that conduit and let the music come through. It is the burning edge, whatever it sounds like and whoever is playing it. It is the noisy, messy, silly, invincible voice of life that comes through the LP on the turn-table, the transistor radio, or the Bose in your new Lexus that makes you want to get up out of whatever you are stuck in and dance. It is Dionysus and the Maenads all over again. No one can control it and I pity whoever tries. I am old now and only a house cat sunning herself in the window - but I was a tigress once, and I remember. I still remember.

From a book talk in Palo Alto for "The Perfectionists"; He pulled out his new iphone and told us that its Apple-designed chipset has 8 billion[!] transistors, and that someone at Intel told him that there are now more transistors in electronics than all the leaves on all the world's trees. Something like 15 quintillion of them!

Men’s minds were too valuable to waste on tasks that a few thousand transistors, some photo-electric cells, and a cubic meter of printed circuits could perform. There were factories that ran for weeks without being visited by a single human being. Men were needed for trouble-shooting, for making decisions, for planning new enterprises. The robots did the rest.

It is important to note that the design of an entire brain region is simpler than the design of a single neuron. As discussed earlier, models often get simpler at a higher level—consider an analogy with a computer. We do need to understand the detailed physics ofsemiconductors to model a transistor, and the equations underlying a single real transistor are complex. A digital circuit that multiples two numbers requires hundreds of them. Yet we can model this multiplication circuit very simply with one or two formulas. An entire computer with billions of transistors can be modeled through its instruction set and register description, which can be described on a handful of written pages of text and formulas. The software programs for an operating system, language compilers, and assemblers are reasonably complex, but modeling a particular program—for example, a speech recognition programbased on hierarchical hidden Markov modeling—may likewise be described in only a few pages of equations. Nowhere in such a description would be found the details ofsemiconductor physics or even of computer architecture. A similar observation holds true for the brain. A particular neocortical pattern recognizer that detects a particular invariant visualfeature (such as a face) or that performs a bandpass filtering (restricting input to a specific frequency range) on sound or that evaluates the temporal proximity of two events can be described with far fewer specific details than the actual physics and chemicalrelations controlling the neurotransmitters, ion channels, and other synaptic and dendritic variables involved in the neural processes. Although all of this complexity needs to be carefully considered before advancing to the next higher conceptual level, much of it can be simplified as the operating principles of the brain are revealed.

An even more advanced form of uploading your mind into a computer was envisioned by computer scientist Hans Moravec. When I interviewed him, he claimed that his method of uploading the human mind could even be done without losing consciousness. First you would be placed on a hospital gurney, next to a robot. Then a surgeon would take individual neurons from your brain and create a duplicate of these neurons (made of transistors) inside the robot. A cable would connect these transistorized neurons to your brain. As time goes by, more and more neurons are removed from your brain and duplicated in the robot. Because your brain is connected to the robot brain, you are fully conscious even as more and more neurons are replaced by transistors. Eventually, without losing consciousness, your entire brain and all its neurons are replaced by transistors. Once all one hundred billion neurons have been duplicated, the connection between you abd the artificial brain is finally cut. When you gaze back at the stretcher, you see your body, lacking its brain, while your consciousness now exists inside a robot.

Daily life in 1960 would be unrecognizable to anyone transported from the year 1930. From 1960 to 1990, a Cold War nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union threatens the survival of civilization. Though begun in the 1950s, the US stockpile of nuclear warheads peaks in the 1960s, with the Soviets’ stockpile peaking in the 1980s.11 The Berlin Wall, erected in 1962, becomes the greatest symbol of Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain,” separating Eastern from Western Europe. Yet it’s dismantled by 1989, as peace breaks out in Europe. The commercialization of the transistor allows consumer electronics to miniaturize, transforming audiovisual equipment from heavy, floor-mounted living room furniture to what you carry in your pocket.

Engineering progress often grows exponentially, especially when it is a simple matter of achieving greater efficiency, such as etching more and more transistors onto a silicon wafer. But when it comes to basic research, which requires luck, skill, and unexpected strokes of genius, progress is more like “punctuated equilibrium,” with long stretches of time when not much happens, with sudden

Is a mind a complicated kind of abstract pattern that develops in an underlying physical substrate, such as a vast network of nerve cells? If so, could something else be substituted for the nerve cells – something such as ants, giving rise to an ant colony that thinks as a whole and has an identity – that is to say, a self? Or could something else be substituted for the tiny nerve cells, such as millions of small computational units made of arrays of transistors, giving rise to an artificial neural network with a conscious mind? Or could software simulating such richly interconnected computational units be substituted, giving rise to a conventional computer (necessarily a far faster and more capacious one than we have ever seen) endowed with a mind and a soul and free will? In short, can thinking and feeling emerge from patterns

Everywhere I went during those days, the streets were filled with talk of the Mets. It was one of those rare moments of unanimity when everyone was thinking about the same thing. People walked around with transistor radios tuned to the game, large crowds gathered in front of appliance store windows to watch the action on silent televisions, sudden cheers would erupt from corner bars, from apartment windows, from invisible rooftops. First it was Atlanta in the playoffs, and then it was Baltimore in the Series. Out of eight October games, the Mets lost only once, and when the adventure was over, New York held another ticker-tape parade, this one even surpassing the extravaganza that had been thrown for the astronauts two months earlier. More than five hundred tons of paper fell into the streets that day, a record that has not been match sense.

In 1962 the president of the American Historical Association, Carl Bridenbaugh, warned his colleagues that human existence was undergoing a “Great Mutation”—so sudden and so radical “that we are now suffering something like historical amnesia.” He lamented the decline of reading; the distancing from nature (which he blamed in part on “ugly yellow Kodak boxes” and “the transistor radio everywhere”); and the loss of shared culture.

Shortly after World War II, decades of investigation into the internal workings of the solids yielded a new piece of electronic hardware called a transistor (for its actual invention, three scientists at Bell Laboratories won the Nobel Prize). Transistors, a family of devices, alter and control the flow of electricity in circuits; one standard rough analogy compares their action to that of faucets controlling the flow of water in pipes.

La innovación se produce por fases. En el caso del transistor, primero fue la invención, liderada por Shockley, Bardeen y Brattain; después la producción, encabezada por ingenieros como Teal, y por último, e igualmente importante, fueron los emprendedores quienes encontraron la forma de crear nuevos mercados. Pat Haggerty, el intrépido jefe de Teal, constituía un llamativo caso práctico de este tercer paso en el proceso de la innovación.

Why does Japan now dominate the world market for transistorized electronic consumer products, to a degree that damages the United States’s balance of payments with Japan, even though transistors were invented and patented in the United States? Because Sony bought transistor licensing rights from Western Electric at a time when the American electronics consumer industry was churning out vacuum tube models and reluctant to compete with its own products.

They consider people who don't know Hamlet from Macbeth to be Philistines, yet they might merrily admit that they don't know the difference between a gene and a chromosome, or a transistor and a capacitor, or an integral and differential equation. These concepts might seem difficult. Yes, but so, too, is Hamlet. And like Hamlet, each of these concepts is beautiful. Like an elegant mathematical equation, they are expressions of the glories of the universe.

Alrededor de 2020, o poco después, la ley de Moore dejará gradualmente de ser válida, y es posible que Silicon Valley se convierta poco a poco en un simple cinturón industrial, salvo que se encuentre una tecnología sustitutiva. Según las leyes de la física, la era del silicio llegará a su fin a medida que entremos en la era postsilicio. Los transistores serán tan pequeños que la teoría cuántica o la física atómica tomarán el relevo, y los electrones se escaparán de los cables.

Once, one of the electronics magazines to which he subscribed had published a joke circuit which was guaranteed not to work. At last, they’d said in an amusing way, here’s something all you ham-fisted hams out there can build in the certain knowledge that if it does nothing, it’s working. It had diodes the wrong way round, transistors upside down, and a flat battery. Newt had built it, and it picked up Radio Moscow. He’d written them a letter of complaint, but they never replied.

Fewer than eight hundred Americans earn a Ph.D. in physics each year. Worldwide, the number is probably in the thousands. And yet from this small pool comes the discovery and innovation that shapes the way we live and think. From X-rays, lasers, radio waves, transistors, atomic energy—and atomic weapons—to our view of space and time, and the nature of the universe, all this has arisen from this dedicated pool of individuals. To be a physicist is to have an enormous potential to change the world.

Frequently, I have been asked if an experiment I have planned is pure or applied science; to me it is more important to know if the experiment will yield new and probably enduring knowledge about nature. If it is likely to yield such knowledge, it is, in my opinion, good fundamental research; and this is more important than whether the motivation is purely aesthetic satisfaction on the part of the experimenter on the one hand or the improvement of the stability of a high-power transistor on the other.

The average working week was now twenty hours—but those twenty hours were no sinecure. There was little work left of a routine, mechanical nature. Men’s minds were too valuable to waste on tasks that a few thousand transistors, some photo-electric cells, and a cubic meter of printed circuits could perform. There were factories that ran for weeks without being visited by a single human being. Men were needed for trouble-shooting, for making decisions, for planning new enterprises. The robots did the rest.

On her first day in Musan, a policeman picked her out of the crowd. “Hey, you,” he yelled at her. After more than two years of living in China, Oak-hee was pale and plump. She used scented shampoo and soap. She looked and smelled different from everyone else. Furthermore, she was also carrying a transistor radio she had purchased in China that picked up South Korean programs. The police officer confiscated the radio and (after asking her to show him the frequencies for South Korean radio and demanding her earphones) turned her over to the Bowibu.

By the 1960s, the price had fallen to $8 or so per transistor. By 1972, the year of my birth, the average cost of a transistor had fallen to 15 cents,6 and the semiconductor industry was churning out between 100 billion and 1 trillion transistors a year. By 2014, humanity produced 250 billion billion transistors annually: 25 times the number of stars in the Milky Way. Each second, the world’s ‘fabs’ – the specialised factories that turn out transistors – spewed out 8 trillion transistors.7 The cost of a transistor had dropped to a few billionths of a dollar.

If you weren’t an android,” Rick interrupted, “if I could legally marry you, I would.” Rachael said, “Or we could live in sin, except that I’m not alive.” “Legally you’re not. But really you are. Biologically. You’re not made out of transistorized circuits like a false animal; you’re an organic entity.” And in two years, he thought, you’ll wear out and die. Because we never solved the problem of cell replacement, as you pointed out. So I guess it doesn’t matter anyhow. This is my end, he said to himself. As a bounty hunter. After the Batys there won’t be any more. Not after this, tonight. “You look so sad,” Rachael said. Putting his hand out, he touched her cheek. “You’re not going to be able to hunt androids any longer,” she said calmly. “So don’t look sad. Please.” He stared at her. “No bounty hunter ever has gone on,” Rachael said. “After being with me. Except one. A very cynical man. Phil Resch. And he’s nutty; he works out in left field on his own.” “I see,” Rick said. He felt numb. Completely. Throughout his entire body. “But this trip we’re taking,” Rachael said, “won’t be wasted, because you’re going to meet a wonderful, spiritual man.

extraordinariamente pequeños (caben holgadamente en la punta de un alfiler) que utilizan la misma tecnología de grabado que se emplea en Silicon Valley, la cual permite imprimir cientos de millones de transistores en una oblea del tamaño de una uña. Una máquina sofisticada, con engranajes, palancas, poleas e incluso motores, puede ocupar menos que el punto que cierra esta frase. Algún día, un cirujano podrá ponerse un casco de telepatía y controlar con él, mediante conexión inalámbrica, un submarino con sistemas micro-electro mecánicos para realizar una operación quirúrgica desde el interior.

There are actually two separate approaches to digitizing the human brain. The first is the Human Brain Project, in which the Swiss are trying to create a computer program that can simulate all of the brain’s basic features using transistors instead of neurons. So far, they have been able to simulate the “thinking process” of a mouse and rabbit for several minutes. The goal of the project is to create a computer that can talk rationally like a normal human being. Its director, Henry Markram, says, “If we build it correctly, it should speak and have an intelligence and behave very much as a human does.

She spent the vestigial hours of the night huddled in a large wing-chair, looking too small for it, her little harmonica-sized tran­sistor radio purring away at her elbow. She kept it on the Paterson station, WPAT, which stayed on all night. There were others that did too, but they were crawling with commercials; this one wasn't. It kept murmuring the melodies of Roberta and Can-Can and My Fair Lady, while the night went by and the world, out there beyond its dial, went by with it. She dozed off finally, her head lolling over like a little girl's propped up asleep in a grown-up's chair. ("Too Nice A Day To Die")

It is impossible to describe the shock of return. I recall that I stood for the longest time staring at a neatly painted yellow line on a neatly formed cement curb. Yellow yellow line line. I pondered the human industry, the paint, the cement truck and concrete forms, all the resources that had bone into one curb. For what? I could not quite think of an answer. So that no car would park there? Are there so many cars that America must be divided into places with and places without them? Was it always so, or did they multiply vastly, along with telephones and new shoes and transistor radios and cellophane-wrapped tomatoes, in our absence?

Kevin Kelly: The biggest invention in Silicon Valley was not the transistor but the start-up model, the culture of the entrepreneurial start-up. Marc Porat: It’s the style of thinking and behaving that’s called “being an entrepreneur.” Megan Smith: I grew up in it. It’s extraordinary. An entrepreneurial culture of like, “Hey, how can we solve this?” And really caring about helping each other. Carol Bartz: It really is just this need to change as fast as possible to enable the next great thing. We don’t even have to imagine the next great thing yet. We just have to get the tools to do something and use trial and error until we have the next great thing.

Ida Rhew was bending low, pulling a pan of rolls from the oven. God, sang a cracking Negro voice from the transistor radio. God don't never change. The gospel program. It was something that haunted Charlotte, though she'd never mentioned it to anyone. If Ida hadn't had that racket turned up so loud they might have heard what was going on in the yard, might have known something was wrong. But then (tossing in her bed at night, trying restlessly to trace events to a possible First Cause) it was she who had made pious Ida work on Sunday in the first place. Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. Jehovah in the Old Testament was always smiting down people for far less.

Ida Rhew was bending low, pulling a pan of rolls from the oven. God, sang a cracking Negro voice from the transistor radio. God don't never change. The gospel program. It was something that haunted Charlotte, though she'd never mentioned it to anyone. If Ida hadn't had that racket turned up so loud they might have heard what was going on in the yard, might have known something was wrong. But then (tossing in her bed at night, trying restlessly to trace events to a possible First Cause) it was she who had made pious Ida work on Sunday in the first place. Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. Jehovah in the Old Testament was always smiting people down for far less.

Once a device had been invented, the inventor then had to find an application for it. Only after it had been in use for a considerable time did consumers come to feel that they “needed” it. Still other devices, invented to serve one purpose, eventually found most of their use for other, unanticipated purposes. It may come as a surprise to learn that these inventions in search of a use include most of the major technological breakthroughs of modern times, ranging from the airplane and automobile, through the internal combustion engine and electric light bulb, to the phonograph and transistor. Thus, invention is often the mother of necessity, rather than vice versa.

The average working week was now twenty hours—but those twenty hours were no sinecure. There was little work left of a routine, mechanical nature. Men’s minds were too valuable to waste on tasks that a few thousand transistors, some photo-electric cells, and a cubic meter of printed circuits could perform. There were factories that ran for weeks without being visited by a single human being. Men were needed for trouble-shooting, for making decisions, for planning new enterprises. The robots did the rest. The existence of so much leisure would have created tremendous problems a century before. Education had overcome most of these, for a well-stocked mind is safe from boredom.

I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow I did not breed or perfect the seeds. I do not make any of my own clothing. I speak a language I did not invent or refine. I did not discover the mathematics I use. I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive of or legislate, and do not enforce or adjudicate. I am moved by music I did not create myself. When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive. I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with. I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being.

Many people who celebrate the arts and the humanities, who applaud vigorously the tributes to their importance in our schools, will proclaim without shame (and sometimes even joke) that they don’t understand math or physics. They extoll the virtues of learning Latin, but they are clueless about how to write an algorithm or tell BASIC from C++, Python from Pascal. They consider people who don’t know Hamlet from Macbeth to be Philistines, yet they might merrily admit that they don’t know the difference between a gene and a chromosome, or a transistor and a capacitor, or an integral and a differential equation. These concepts may seem difficult. Yes, but so, too, is Hamlet. And like Hamlet, each of these concepts is beautiful.

The exponential growth of this industry was correlated with the phenomenon famously discovered by Moore, who in 1965 drew a graph of the speed of integrated circuits, based on the number of transistors that could be placed on a chip, and showed that it doubled about every two years, a trajectory that could be expected to continue. This was reaffirmed in 1971, when Intel was able to etch a complete central processing unit onto one chip, the Intel 4004, which was dubbed a “microprocessor.”Moore’s Law has held generally true to this day, and its reliable projection of performance to price allowed two generations of young entrepreneurs, including Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, to create cost projections for their forward- leaning products.

The exponential growth of this industry was correlated with the phenomenon famously discovered by Moore, who in 1965 drew a graph of the speed of integrated circuits, based on the number of transistors that could be placed on a chip, and showed that it doubled about every two years, a trajectory that could be expected to continue. This was reaffirmed in 1971, when Intel was able to etch a complete central processing unit onto one chip, the Intel 4004, which was dubbed a “microprocessor.” Moore’s Law has held generally true to this day, and its reliable projection of performance to price allowed two generations of young entrepreneurs, including Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, to create cost projections for their forward-leaning products. The

Moore’s law means computers will get smaller, more powerful, and cheaper at a reliable rate. This does not happen because Moore’s law is a natural law of the physical world, like gravity, or the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It happens because the consumer and business markets motivate computer chip makers to compete and contribute to smaller, faster, cheaper computers, smart phones, cameras, printers, solar arrays, and soon, 3-D printers. And chip makers are building on the technologies and techniques of the past. In 1971, 2,300 transistors could be printed on a chip. Forty years, or twenty doublings later, 2,600,000,000. And with those transistors, more than two million of which could fit on the period at the end of this sentence, came increased speed.

My father told me, ‘You always want to be in the middle,’ ” he said. “I didn’t want to be up with the high-level people like Steve. My dad was an engineer, and that’s what I wanted to be. I was way too shy ever to be a business leader like Steve.” By fourth grade Wozniak became, as he put it, one of the “electronics kids.” He had an easier time making eye contact with a transistor than with a girl, and he developed the chunky and stooped look of a guy who spends most of his time hunched over circuit boards. At the same age when Jobs was puzzling over a carbon microphone that his dad couldn’t explain, Wozniak was using transistors to build an intercom system featuring amplifiers, relays, lights, and buzzers that connected the kids’ bedrooms of six houses in the neighborhood. And at an age when Jobs was

Ants In his paper “Moore’s Law at 40,” Gordon Moore makes an interesting observation. He points out that, according to biologist E. O. Wilson, there are 1015 to 1016 ants in the world. By comparison, in 2014 there were about 1020 transistors in the world, or tens of thousands of transistors per ant.8 An ant’s brain might contain a quarter of a million neurons, and thousands of synapses per neuron, which suggests that the world’s ant brains have a combined complexity similar to that of the world’s human brains. So we shouldn’t worry too much about when computers will catch up with us in complexity. After all, we’ve caught up to ants, and they don’t seem too concerned. Sure, we seem like we’ve taken over the planet, but if I had to bet on which one of us would still be around in a million years—primates, computers, or ants—I know who I’d pick.

the thesis is that after many generations in which technology favored centralization (railroads, telegraph, radio, television, movies, mass production) since about 1950 it is now favoring decentralization (transistor, personal computer, internet, remote work, smartphone, cryptocurrency). So by this measure, peak centralization was about 1950, when there was one telephone company (AT&T), two superpowers (US/USSR), and three TV stations (ABC/CBS/NBC). Even though the 1950s are romanticized in the US, and there were certainly good things about the era, that level of centralization was not natural. This was an enormous degree of cultural homogenization, conformity, and sameness relative to the pre-1914 world just a few decades prior. Many aspects of individual initiative, creativity, and freedom had been dulled down or eliminated in the standardization process.

As World War II was ending, the great engineer and public official Vannevar Bush argued that America’s innovation engine would require a three-way partnership of government, business, and academia. He was uniquely qualified to envision that triangle, because he had a foot in all three camps. He had been dean of engineering at MIT, a founder of Raytheon, and the chief government science administrator overseeing, among other projects, the building of the atom bomb.4 Bush’s recommendation was that government should not build big research labs of its own, as it had done with the atomic bomb project, but instead should fund research at universities and corporate labs. This government-business-university partnership produced the great innovations that propelled the U.S. economy in the postwar period, including transistors, microchips, computers, graphical user interfaces, GPS, lasers, the internet, and search engines.

For many decades quantum theory was regarded primarily as a mathematical description of phenomenal accuracy and reliability, capable of explaining the shapes and behaviours of molecules, the workings of electronic transistors, the colours of nature and the laws of optics, and a whole lot else. It would be routinely described as ‘the theory of the atomic world’: an account of what the world is like at the tiniest scales we can access with microscopes. Talking about the interpretation of quantum mechanics was, on the other hand, a parlour game suitable only for grandees in the twilight of their career, or idle discussion over a beer. Or worse: only a few decades ago, professing a serious interest in the topic could be tantamount to career suicide for a young physicist. Only a handful of scientists and philosophers, idiosyncratically if not plain crankily, insisted on caring about the answer. Many researchers would shrug or roll their eyes when the ‘meaning’ of quantum mechanics came up; some still do. ‘Ah, nobody understands it anyway!

It is certainly conceivable, as at least one well-known physicist has speculated (to hoots from most of his colleagues), that the human brain takes advantage of quantum mechanical effects. Yet there is no evidence whatsoever that this is the case. Certainly, the physics of a neuron depends on quantum mechanics, just as the physics of a transistor does, but there is no evidence that neural processing takes place at the quantum mechanical level as opposed to the classical level; that is, there is no evidence that quantum mechanics is necessary to explain human thought. As far as we know, all the relevant computational properties of a neuron can be simulated on a conventional computer. If this is indeed the case, then it is also possible to simulate a network of tens of billions of such neurons, which means, in turn, that the brain can be simulated on a universal machine. Even if it turns out that the brain takes advantage of quantum computation, we will probably learn how to build devices that take advantage of the same effects—in which case it will still be possible to simulate the human brain with a machine.

So it was possible to look at actual smartphones and tablets and laptops that had been manufactured on Old Earth. They did not work anymore, but their technical capabilities were described on little placards. And they were impressive compared to what Kath Two and other modern people carried around in their pockets. This ran contrary to most people’s intuition, since in other areas the achievements of the modern world—the habitat ring, the Eye, and all the rest—were so vastly greater than what the people of Old Earth had ever accomplished. It boiled down to Amistics. In the decades before Zero, the Old Earthers had focused their intelligence on the small and the soft, not the big and the hard, and built a civilization that was puny and crumbling where physical infrastructure was concerned, but astonishingly sophisticated when it came to networked communications and software. The density with which they’d been able to pack transistors onto chips still had not been matched by any fabrication plant now in existence. Their devices could hold more data than anything you could buy today. Their ability to communicate through all sorts of wireless schemes was only now being matched—and that only in densely populated, affluent places like the Great Chain.

The Memory Business Steven Sasson is a tall man with a lantern jaw. In 1973, he was a freshly minted graduate of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His degree in electrical engineering led to a job with Kodak’s Apparatus Division research lab, where, a few months into his employment, Sasson’s supervisor, Gareth Lloyd, approached him with a “small” request. Fairchild Semiconductor had just invented the first “charge-coupled device” (or CCD)—an easy way to move an electronic charge around a transistor—and Kodak needed to know if these devices could be used for imaging.4 Could they ever. By 1975, working with a small team of talented technicians, Sasson used CCDs to create the world’s first digital still camera and digital recording device. Looking, as Fast Company once explained, “like a ’70s Polaroid crossed with a Speak-and-Spell,”5 the camera was the size of a toaster, weighed in at 8.5 pounds, had a resolution of 0.01 megapixel, and took up to thirty black-and-white digital images—a number chosen because it fell between twenty-four and thirty-six and was thus in alignment with the exposures available in Kodak’s roll film. It also stored shots on the only permanent storage device available back then—a cassette tape. Still, it was an astounding achievement and an incredible learning experience. Portrait of Steven Sasson with first digital camera, 2009 Source: Harvey Wang, From Darkroom to Daylight “When you demonstrate such a system,” Sasson later said, “that is, taking pictures without film and showing them on an electronic screen without printing them on paper, inside a company like Kodak in 1976, you have to get ready for a lot of questions. I thought people would ask me questions about the technology: How’d you do this? How’d you make that work? I didn’t get any of that. They asked me when it was going to be ready for prime time? When is it going to be realistic to use this? Why would anybody want to look at their pictures on an electronic screen?”6 In 1996, twenty years after this meeting took place, Kodak had 140,000 employees and a $28 billion market cap. They were effectively a category monopoly. In the United States, they controlled 90 percent of the film market and 85 percent of the camera market.7 But they had forgotten their business model. Kodak had started out in the chemistry and paper goods business, for sure, but they came to dominance by being in the convenience business. Even that doesn’t go far enough. There is still the question of what exactly Kodak was making more convenient. Was it just photography? Not even close. Photography was simply the medium of expression—but what was being expressed? The “Kodak Moment,” of course—our desire to document our lives, to capture the fleeting, to record the ephemeral. Kodak was in the business of recording memories. And what made recording memories more convenient than a digital camera? But that wasn’t how the Kodak Corporation of the late twentieth century saw it. They thought that the digital camera would undercut their chemical business and photographic paper business, essentially forcing the company into competing against itself. So they buried the technology. Nor did the executives understand how a low-resolution 0.01 megapixel image camera could hop on an exponential growth curve and eventually provide high-resolution images. So they ignored it. Instead of using their weighty position to corner the market, they were instead cornered by the market.

the device had the property of transresistance and should have a name similar to devices such as the thermistor and varistor, Pierce proposed transistor. Exclaimed Brattain, “That’s it!” The naming process still had to go through a formal poll of all the other engineers, but transistor easily won the election over five other options.35 On June 30, 1948, the press gathered in the auditorium of Bell Labs’ old building on West Street in Manhattan. The event featured Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain as a group, and it was moderated by the director of research, Ralph Bown, dressed in a somber suit and colorful bow tie. He emphasized that the invention sprang from a combination of collaborative teamwork and individual brilliance: “Scientific research is coming more and more to be recognized as a group or teamwork job. . . . What we have for you today represents a fine example of teamwork, of brilliant individual contributions, and of the value of basic research in an industrial framework.”36 That precisely described the mix that had become the formula for innovation in the digital age. The New York Times buried the story on page 46 as the last item in its “News of Radio” column, after a note about an upcoming broadcast of an organ concert. But Time made it the lead story of its science section, with the headline “Little Brain Cell.” Bell Labs enforced the rule that Shockley be in every publicity photo along with Bardeen and Brattain. The most famous one shows the three of them in Brattain’s lab. Just as it was about to be taken, Shockley sat down in Brattain’s chair, as if it were his desk and microscope, and became the focal point of the photo. Years later Bardeen would describe Brattain’s lingering dismay and his resentment of Shockley: “Boy, Walter hates this picture. . . . That’s Walter’s equipment and our experiment,

Bell resisted selling Texas Instruments a license. “This business is not for you,” the firm was told. “We don’t think you can do it.”38 In the spring of 1952, Haggerty was finally able to convince Bell Labs to let Texas Instruments buy a license to manufacture transistors. He also hired away Gordon Teal, a chemical researcher who worked on one of Bell Labs’ long corridors near the semiconductor team. Teal was an expert at manipulating germanium, but by the time he joined Texas Instruments he had shifted his interest to silicon, a more plentiful element that could perform better at high temperatures. By May 1954 he was able to fabricate a silicon transistor that used the n-p-n junction architecture developed by Shockley. Speaking at a conference that month, near the end of reading a thirty-one-page paper that almost put listeners to sleep, Teal shocked the audience by declaring, “Contrary to what my colleagues have told you about the bleak prospects for silicon transistors, I happen to have a few of them here in my pocket.” He proceeded to dunk a germanium transistor connected to a record player into a beaker of hot oil, causing it to die, and then did the same with one of his silicon transistors, during which Artie Shaw’s “Summit Ridge Drive” continued to blare undiminished. “Before the session ended,” Teal later said, “the astounded audience was scrambling for copies of the talk, which we just happened to bring along.”39 Innovation happens in stages. In the case of the transistor, first there was the invention, led by Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain. Next came the production, led by engineers such as Teal. Finally, and equally important, there were the entrepreneurs who figured out how to conjure up new markets. Teal’s plucky boss Pat Haggerty was a colorful case study of this third step in the innovation process.

While linearity is a truly astonishing property of nature, it is by no means a rare one. All circuits made up of the resistors, capacitors, and inductors discussed in Chapter I in connection with network theory are linear, and so are telegraph lines and cables. Indeed, usually electrical circuits are linear, except when they include vacuum tubes, or transistors, or diodes, and sometimes even such circuits are substantially linear.

There is always a temptation for governments to pursue science with particular commercial aims in view. But this rarely works. Had there been a stated purpose to quantum physics in the 1920s, it would have been deemed a failure. And yet quantum physics has given us the transistor, the laser, the basis of nanotechnology, and much else besides. Building a capacity for advanced technology is not like planning production in a socialist economy, but more like growing a rock garden. Planting, watering, and weeding are more appropriate than five-year plans.

Those already conditioned from infancy by school training and television tutelage to regard megatechnics as the highest point in man's 'conquest of nature,' will accept this totalitarian control of their own development not as a horrid sacrifice but as a highly desirable fulfillment, looking forward to being constantly attached to the Big Brain, as they are now attached to radio stations by portable transistor sets even while walking the streets. By accepting these means they expect that every human problem will be solved for them, and the only human sin will be that of failing to obey instructions. Their 'real' life will be confined within the frame of a television screen.

Woven deep into the vast communication networks wrapping the globe, we also find evidence of embryonic technological autonomy. The technium contains 170 quadrillion computer chips wired up into one mega-scale computing platform. The total number of transistors in this global network is now approximately the same as the number of neurons in your brain. And the number of links among files in this network (think of all the links among all the web pages of the world) is about equal to the number of synapse links in your brain. Thus, this growing planetary electronic membrane is already comparable to the complexity of a human brain. It has three billion artificial eyes (phone and webcams) plugged in, it processes keyword searches at the humming rate of 14 kilohertz (a barely audible high-pitched whine), and it is so large a contraption that it now consumes 5 percent of the world’s electricity. When computer scientists dissect the massive rivers of traffic flowing through it, they cannot account for the source of all the bits. Every now and then a bit is transmitted incorrectly, and while most of those mutations can be attributed to identifiable causes such as hacking, machine error, or line damage, the researchers are left with a few percent that somehow changed themselves. In other words, a small fraction of what the technium communicates originates not from any of its known human-made nodes but from the system at large. The technium is whispering to itself.

When both NMOS and PMOS field-effect transistors are combined in a complementary arrangement, power is used only when the transistors are switching, making dense, low-power circuit designs possible. Because of this, virtually all modern processors are designed using CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) technology.

There you are,” I told my mother, standing in the hot breeze that had entered along with the rattle of traffic and the voices in the street. “Brooklyn.” My mother turned to Gabe, who was holding her hand. “Show me,” she said again. The strain of this vigil was evident in the shape of his shoulders and the weariness in his eyes. He glanced up at me where I stood by the window and then down at her again. “All right,” he said softly. He got up slowly, pushing back the old dining-room chair. He leaned over the bed, slipping his hands beneath her. I watched in some astonishment as he lifted her, the bedclothes trailing. “Get the door,” he said over his shoulder as he made his way out of the room with our mother in his arms like a child. He turned to his side to fit them both through the passageway, and I overtook them in the living room. We had lined the woodwork here with boric acid, to keep the roaches at bay, and there was something of its pale dust over everything in those days. It sometimes made me recall: sand of Syria and Mount Lebanon. I went ahead to open the door. Gabe slipped through it, our mother in his arms. I followed them down the stairs, astonished, full of objections, but unable to object. I watched him as he gently negotiated the turnings. I wondered briefly if he planned to carry her all the way to the hospital. In the vestibule, the door to the parlor-floor apartment was still patched with plywood. Gabe turned to me and nodded toward the street. My mother’s eyes were closed. In my brother’s arms she seemed as small and light as an infant. I went ahead to pull the first door open, and then slipped around them to get the outer door as well. There was a blast of heat. Gabe carried my mother into the sunlight and down the steps. There were kids on the stoop across the street, there was the tinny music from their transistor radios. They glared, open-mouthed. A pair of dark men passing by looked up as Gabe came down the stairs with my mother in his arms. They walked to the curb, glancing over their shoulders, giving him wide berth. Gabe, too, went to the curb and then turned around to look back up at the house. I rushed to scoop up the sheet and the blanket that was now brushing the sidewalk. “You’re here, Momma,” I heard him say. “Where we’ve always lived.” My mother raised her head. She extricated one thin hand from the winding bedclothes and raised it to her eyes against the sun. She looked down the street and then up at our building, the blue summer light reflecting in the glass of the front door, the bowed parlor window—some plywood there, too—and then up to the fourth floor, where a bit of lace curtain, her handiwork, had been drawn through the opened window. “Not home,” I heard Gabe tell her, reassuring her. “Brooklyn.