Science Friction

Limerick - City on the Shannon

My work took me to Limerick, a city I have never before visited. At least not as far as I can remember. The occasion was work related and required a visit to Dell's factory there. The security was quite strict. Not only did I have to sign in but I had to register my PDA, my USB flash drives and my laptop. The security guard searched for the serial number of the laptop but without success. (You have to remove the batter to expose it). "They just need some distinguishing feature to identify it," said the Dell employee who was signing me in. I flipped the laptop the correct way up, pointed to the Apple logo and asked 'How many people here have a Powerbook?

I had decided to travel to Limerick by train. For a start, I don't like driving long distance in Ireland. that probably has something to do with having lived in Belgium so long where everywhere I wanted to go to was accessible either by motorway or dual carriageway. The other reason is that I like to make some use of the time and get some work done. Going to Limerick I travelled Standard Class and drank some instant coffee of a well known brand. You must know who I'm talking about! They say they use the same beans for their instant coffee as for their ground coffee.

Anyway, coming back I treated myself to the Citygold service – I connected with Cork-Dublin train at Limerick Junction where I was served a caftiere of coffee of the same brand. I can confirm, that this firm does indeed use the same beans for instant and for ground. This is not neceesarily a good thing.

Moore's law update

ZDNET news is reporting that Intel has paid $10,000 for a copy of an original copy of the 19 April 1965 edition of Electronics. The owner had been resisting pressure from his wife to throw out his collection of magazines. Good thing too.

It Was the '60s, Man

Tomorrow marks the 40th anniversary of one of the most important events in the IT revolution. The event itself went relatively unremarked at the time. To mark its 35th anniversary, the magazine Electronics, which at the time was all about vacuum tubes and such like, invited a number of contributors to write about their vision of the future. One of those contributors was the research director of Fairchild Semiconductors, Gordon Moore.

"The future of integrated electronics is the future of electronics itself," he wrote. "The advantages of integration will bring about a proliferation of electronics, pushing this science into many new areas. Integrated circuits will lead to such wonders as home computers ..."

(Via Wired News.)

The article was buried on page 114 of the April 19 1965 edition of Electronics. In it Moore observed that over the previous few years, the number of components on an integrated circuit doubled every year and he assumed it would continue for the next decade as transistors became smaller. Thus was born Moore's Law, although the term would not be coined until the early 1970s.

Three years after the article appeared, Moore left Fairchild with several colleagues to found Intel.