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Most people would not recognize anyone in the photo above. They have no reasons to. Yet, the eight sitting darksuited computer scientists who posed together for Wayne Miller of Magnum were responsible for fundamentally reshaping the modern life.
There was a happier photo four years earlier when some of them were toasting their then-boss William Shockley for the Nobel prize. But that was 1956. Merely a year later, they would have a fallout with Shockley — a brilliant scientist but paranoid and domineering boss (who would later become an eugenicist) — and went on to found Fairchild Semiconductor, named after an East Coast company that provided the initial funding.
In many ways, it was the prototypical start-up, avant l’heure. There were eight of them (in the photo, from left to right): Gordon Moore, C. Sheldon Roberts, Eugene Kleiner, Robert Noyce, Victor Grinich, Julius Blank, Jean Hoerni and Jay Last. They were a diverse crew, having majored in everything from metallurgy to optics. Although Miller’s photo suggested otherwise, the dress-code was relaxed, and there were no assigned parking spaces, fixed office hours, or closed office doors.
They ran their start-up out of a 14,000 square foot building at 844 Charleston Road, between Palo Alto and Mountain View, which initially lacked plumbing and electricity. It was located in an area then known as Valley of Heart’s Delight (a place then known for being the largest fruit production region in the world) but their work in semiconductors there was so groundbreaking that they managed to change the place’s toponym into Silicon Valley.
From this ramshackle office, they managed to mass-produce silicon transistors for IBM; Noyce’s design for ‘microchip’ — essentially transforming bulky circuit boards into layers of silicon and germanium — was so transformational that by the mid-1960s, thirty percent of all integrated circuits in America were Fairchild-made. This chip made NASA’s manned mission to the Moon possible later in the decade.
By 1969, however, the group — then already dubbed Traitorous Eight by Shockley — had disbanded. In another pioneering tradition of the Valley, they would go on to found their own startups, which included National Semiconductor, Amelco/Teledyne, LSI, and Intel. Moore was immortalized by the computing law that bears his name, and Eugene Kleiner by the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers — an early investor in everything from Amazon to Google. Noyce, who co-founded Intel with Moore, mentored Steve Jobs. Other early Fairchild employees included Intel’s Andrew Grove, and Don Valentine, founder of another VC titan, Sequoia Capital, which had invested in Atari, Cisco, and LinkedIn. A 2014 study suggests that 92 public companies could be traced back to Fairchild, totally market capitalization of $2.1 trillion.
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A word about Patreon, a fundraising platform. In their words, “Patreon is an Internet-based platform that allows content creators to build their own subscription content service.” I had tremendous fun researching and writing Iconic Photos. But that research does come with a price tag — in web hosting, books, library subscriptions, and copious coffee. So this Patreon is just to fray some of those costs.
As you may notice in last few years, I have been posting very infrequently. But I want IP to go on for a long time and be sustainable. Linking a monetary value to a new post (not a ‘monthly salary’ — which is another way of doing Patreon) give me a marginal incentive to create more compelling and educational content. Readers who subscribe on Patreon might have access to a few blog posts early; chance to request this topic or that topic; or to participate in some polls. Currently there is a public poll running on whether you might want to see non-photo related posts, so go and vote!
Here is the link: https://www.patreon.com/iconicphotos
Filed under: Culture, Society Tagged: Fairchild, Gordon Moore, Kleiner Perkins, semiconductors, Silicon Valley, Wayne Miller, William Shockley
Very interesting, how come I didn't know.
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from  Heat Street:
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| жееееееесть! |
By Jillian Kay Melchior | 2:11 pm, May 6, 2016
New York’s City council voted this week to force retailers to charge a fee of at least 5 cents for each plastic bag. “The fee is irritating, which his precisely why it works,” Councilwoman Margaret Chin, the legislation’s main sponsor, told the New York Times. “We don’t want to pay it, so we’ll bring [reusable] bags instead. So the fact that it’s irritating irritates a lot of people.”
It’s bad enough that New York’s council has deliberately set out to annoy and frustrate its constituents. Even worse, this pesky rule is may actually do even more damage to the environment—and it comes with some serious health risks for consumers.
Plastic bag litter is actually much less of a problem than New York’s City Council realizes. One comprehensive study found that plastic bags account for just 0.6 percent of all litter. And New Yorkers already often end up reusing their bags, lining bathroom trash cans or cleaning up after dogs on the street.
The environmental argument against plastic bags isn’t strong, either. Reusable bags are much more carbon-intensive to create, so consumers have to use them a whole lot of times before they become greener than the alternative.
The United Kingdom studied this in depth, factoring in everything from the extraction of raw materials to a reusable bag’s manufacture, distribution and disposal. It concluded that the basic plastic bag is actually 200 times greener than cotton reusable bags.
A consumer would have to use a cotton bag no fewer than 131 times before it becomes greener than flimsy plastic; polypropylene is a bit better, but still requires at least 11 uses before breaking even.
But a recent Clemson study found that consumers forgot their reusable bags about 40 percent of the time. And on average, those reusable polypropylene bags ended up getting only about 3.1 uses before shoppers tossed them.
In addition to the bag ban’s nebulous environmental benefits, there’s also a major ick factor.
A whopping 97 percent of consumers don’t regularly wash their bags, according to a report from the University of Arizona and Loma Linda University. Their researchers swabbed 84 bags for bacteria, and the findings were outright nasty: coliform bacteria in half, E. coli in 12 percent.
When San Francisco banned plastic bags, the number of E. coli infections spiked. Even worse, the number of foodborne-illness deaths rose a whopping 46 percent in the three months after the bag ban began.
Far be it from the green do-gooders on New York’s city council to consider something as boring as science, though. They’ve got a planet to save!
— Jillian Kay Melchior writes for Heat Street and is a fellow for the Steamboat Institute and Independent Women’s Forum.
The plastic bags ban outraged me from the beginning.
Kolejka (queue) is a Polish board game based on life under communism.
The players line up their pawns in front of the shops without knowing which shop will have a delivery. Tension mounts as the product delivery cards are uncovered and it turns out that there will be enough product cards only for the lucky few standing closest to the door of a store. Since everyone wants to be first, the queue starts to push up against the door. To get ahead, the people in the queue use a range of queuing cards, such as “Mother carrying small child”, “This is not your place, sir”, or “Under-the-counter goods”. But they have to watch out for “Closed for stocktaking”, “Delivery error”, and for the black pawns – the speculators – standing in the queue. Only those players who make the best use of the queuing cards in their hand will come home with full shopping bags.
…In this realistic game you really have to be savvy to get the goods.
The game was initially developed by Poland’s Institute for National Remembrance to teach about life under communism but the game became an unexpected hit and has since been translated into English, French, Japanese and Russian among other languages.
The Russian government, however, is not amused and have banned the game.
IPN reported that Russia’s consumer watchdog Rospotrebnadzor warned that the game is perceived as “anti-Russian” and excessively critical of the Soviet system. Russian authorities asked Trefl, the company who bought the game’s license from IPN, to either remove the direct historical references from it or risk getting the product banned.
“IPN did not agree to the implementation of these changes and that is why Kolejka is no longer in Russian shops,” a statement by IPN reads.
I imagine the Russians wouldn’t like Kremlin either.
Addendum: A lot of Americans could use some reminders about price controls and socialism, fortunately you can download and print Kolejka in English here (scroll down).
The post Russia Bans Queue appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Вся жизнь в четырех минутах...
Стихи: Аля Кудряшева
Музыка: А. Васильев
В ролях: моя дочь Юлия Зигаева
Монтаж: Alex
* * *
Мама на даче, ключ на столе, завтрак можно не делать. Скоро каникулы, восемь лет, в августе будет девять. В августе девять, семь на часах, небо легко и плоско, солнце оставило в волосах выцветшие полоски. Сонный обрывок в ладонь зажать, и упустить сквозь пальцы. Витька с десятого этажа снова зовет купаться. Надо спешить со всех ног и глаз — вдруг убегут, оставят. Витька закончил четвёртый класс — то есть почти что старый. Шорты с футболкой — простой наряд, яблоко взять на полдник. Витька научит меня нырять, он обещал, я помню. К речке дорога исхожена, выжжена и привычна. Пыльные ноги похожи на мамины рукавички. Нынче такая у нас жара — листья совсем как тряпки. Может быть, будем потом играть, я попрошу, чтоб в прятки. Витька — он добрый, один в один мальчик из Жюля Верна. Я попрошу, чтобы мне водить, мне разрешат, наверно. Вечер начнётся, должно стемнеть. День до конца недели. Я поворачиваюсь к стене. Сто, девяносто девять.
Мама на даче. Велосипед. Завтра сдавать экзамен. Солнце облизывает конспект ласковыми глазами. Утро встречать и всю ночь сидеть, ждать наступленья лета. В августе буду уже студент, нынче — ни то, ни это. Хлеб получёрствый и сыр с ножа, завтрак со сна невкусен. Витька с десятого этажа нынче на третьем курсе. Знает всех умных профессоров, пишет программы в фирме. Худ, ироничен и чернобров, прямо герой из фильма. Пишет записки моей сестре, дарит цветы с получки, только вот плаваю я быстрей и сочиняю лучше. Просто сестрёнка светла лицом, я тяжелей и злее, мы забираемся на крыльцо и запускаем змея. Вроде, они уезжают в ночь, я провожу на поезд. Речка шуршит, шелестит у ног, нынче она по пояс. Семьдесят восемь, семьдесят семь, плачу спиной к составу. Пусть они прячутся, ну их всех, я их искать не стану.
Мама на даче. Башка гудит. Сонное недеянье. Кошка устроилась на груди, солнце на одеяле. Чашки, ладошки и свитера, кофе, молю, сварите. Кто–нибудь видел меня вчера? Лучше не говорите. Пусть это будет большой секрет маленького разврата, каждый был пьян, невесом, согрет, тёплым дыханьем брата, горло охрипло от болтовни, пепел летел с балкона, все друг при друге — и все одни, живы и непокорны. Если мы скинемся по рублю, завтрак придёт в наш домик, Господи, как я вас всех люблю, радуга на ладонях. Улица в солнечных кружевах, Витька, помой тарелки. Можно валяться и оживать. Можно пойти на реку. Я вас поймаю и покорю, стричься заставлю, бриться. Носом в изломанную кору. Тридцать четыре, тридцать...
Мама на фотке. Ключи в замке. Восемь часов до лета. Солнце на стенах, на рюкзаке, в стареньких сандалетах. Сонными лапами через сквер, и никуда не деться. Витька в Америке. Я в Москве. Речка в далеком детстве. Яблоко съелось, ушел состав, где–нибудь едет в Ниццу, я начинаю считать со ста, жизнь моя — с единицы. Боремся, плачем с ней в унисон, клоуны на арене. «Двадцать один», — бормочу сквозь сон. «Сорок», — смеётся время. Сорок — и первая седина, сорок один — в больницу. Двадцать один — я живу одна, двадцать: глаза–бойницы, ноги в царапинах, бес в ребре, мысли бегут вприсядку, кто–нибудь ждёт меня во дворе, кто–нибудь — на десятом. Десять — кончаю четвёртый класс, завтрак можно не делать. Надо спешить со всех ног и глаз. В августе будет девять. Восемь — на шее ключи таскать, в солнечном таять гимне...
Три. Два. Один. Я иду искать. Господи, помоги мне.
Написал AlexAZ на nostalgy.dirty.ru / комментировать
Я в эти стихи влюбился давным-давно, еще когда в жж прочитал.
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