There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

Sokiera: This is an interview for the Oral History and Cultural Heritage Center at The University of Southern Mississippi. It is eleven o’clock on November 8, 2012. My name is Jason Sokiera, and I am at the home of Mr. Richard Burger. Mr. Burger, thank you for agreeing to this interview. And first I just wanted to begin by asking you about your childhood, where you were born, where you grew up, things like that.

Oral history

From 1965 to 1975 the legendary Silicon Valley company Fairchild Semiconductor operated a state-of-the-art integrated circuit manufacturing plant in Shiprock, New Mexico on Navajo land. In the face of concerns about high-tech pollution, increasingly empowered labor organizations, and a newly politicized and visible American Indian civil rights movement, indigenous electronic workers at Shiprock were pressed into service as examples of the peaceful coexistence and integration of the past and the future, the primitive and the modern, creativity and capitalism. Navajo women workers were described as ideal predigital digital workers, uniquely suited to the job by temperament, culture, and gender. Their labor as platform builders was cited as evidence that digital work—the work of the hand and its digits—could be painlessly transferred from the indigenous cultural context into the world of technological commercial innovation, benefiting both in the process.

Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronic Manufacture

Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech, 1930–1970

This talk is available as Technical Report No. 101, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and will appear in a forthcoming issue of Fortune Magazine.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel7/7533311/7533312/07533331.pdf

Molecular engineering

Founded in 1957 by eight dissidents from Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, Fairchild Semiconductor developed some of the most important innovations in 20th century technology and sowed the seeds of the microelectronic-driven computer industry of today. This article surveys some of the key personalities who worked at the company and describes their technological and management contributions.

A Company of Legend: The Legacy of Fairchild Semiconductor

From the 1940s into the early 1960s, hundreds of scientists and engineers worldwide pursued efforts in microcircuitry-miniaturized, integrated electronic circuits By tracing the diverse activities and alternatives they explored-from early printed wiring to semiconductor integrated circuit efforts-this article provides the first comprehensive overview of the early history of microcircuitry

The Early History of Microcircuitry: An Overview

The modern integrated circuit evolved from developments at Fairchild Semiconductor during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Using information from laboratory notebooks, internal company memoranda, oral histories, and personal communications, this article reconstructs and analyzes the activities of the Fairchild development team, including the company's efforts to improve and market ICs during the early 1960s.

Making Micrologic: The Development of the Planar IC at Fairchild Semiconductor, 1957&#x2013;1963

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Westinghouse Electric engineers and scientists pursued research and developed many innovations in semiconductor design and manufacturing that found widespread use throughout the industry and later contributed to the important role of ICs in the development of computing.

D. A. Laws

Papers

A Company of Legend: The Legacy of Fairchild Semiconductor

The Early History of Microcircuitry: An Overview

Making Micrologic: The Development of the Planar IC at Fairchild Semiconductor, 1957–1963

Westinghouse: Microcircuit Pioneer from Molecular Electronics to ICs

The Settings for the Stories: A Tour of John Steinbeck's “Valley of the World”

D. A. Laws

Papers

A Company of Legend: The Legacy of Fairchild Semiconductor

The Early History of Microcircuitry: An Overview

Making Micrologic: The Development of the Planar IC at Fairchild Semiconductor, 1957&#x2013;1963

Westinghouse: Microcircuit Pioneer from Molecular Electronics to ICs

The Settings for the Stories: A Tour of John Steinbeck's “Valley of the World”

Making Micrologic: The Development of the Planar IC at Fairchild Semiconductor, 1957–1963