Technology

It is generally well appreciated that Information Technology (IT) is the engine room of the global economy. By it meant that IT is not just a sector of the economy, it is the very infrastructure that supports and drives the global economy, enabling growth and innovation.

It is a common question among futurists what will be the next great driver of future wealth and prosperity? By all indicators, that driver is most likely to be biotechnology (biotech).

Biotechnology is the use of biological systems, living organisms, or parts of them (often at the molecular or cellular level) to develop or create products, processes, or technologies that improve human health, agriculture, industry and other fields.

Many observers believe that biotech promises the greatest revolution in human history. They believe that it will transform every aspect of human life: our medical care, our food, our health, our entertainment, our very bodies. In terms of economic impact, biotech is already making a massive contribution. In 2019, the size of the global bioeconomy was estimated at approx. $5trillion accounting for roughly 6% of global GDP. Based on current trends of 10–15% annual revenue growth, the global bioeconomy could exceed $20 trillion by 2030.

Now one doesn’t expect such a powerful technology to appear overnight out of thin air. Biotechnology unsurprisingly, has a long history of intellectual antecedents that preceded and eventually precipitated it current bloom. It started in the mid to late 19^th century with the work of Austrian monk and biologist, Gregor Mendel. Mendel carried out research that established the mathematical laws of genetic inheritance, describing how traits are passed from parents to offspring, thus giving birth to the field of modern genetics. Much of this work took place within a 10-year stretch from 1856 to 1866.  

Biotechnology relies on the understanding of Mendelian genetics to predict and control the outcomes of genetic modifications. But Mendelian genetics was not enough. Further breakthroughs were needed to bring mankind on the brink of the biotech age.

The next major milestone would come very shortly after the culmination of Mendel’s work with discovery of DNA, the building blocks of life in 1868 by Fritz Miescher, a Swiss physician. While this was no doubt, a major milestone, by itself it wasn’t complete.

To be able to be in a position to launch the biotech age, it wasn’t just enough to understand DNA’s function. It was also important to decipher its structure. That didn’t happen until 1953. In the city of Cambridge, England, two young scientists: American James Watson and Briton Francis Crick managed to determine the exact structure of DNA using a technique known as x-ray crystallography. What they found is the now famous “double helix” shown below:

The deciphering of the structure of DNA gave birth to the field of molecular biology, which is the fundamental knowledge base that drives biotech research, but still further breakthroughs were needed. It was not until the 1970s that it could officially be said that the biotech age had finally arrived.

The biotech industry was actually jumpstarted in the 1970s with the invention of what is known as recombinant DNA technology by two biochemists named Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen. They would eventually form a company called Genentech, which is widely regarded as the mother company of the biotech industry.

Why recombinant DNA was such a big deal was because it enabled the DNA of two different organisms to be joined together (the technique for doing that is called splicing). DNA splicing made it possible to carry out genetic engineering, which gives one the ability to alter matter at the cellular level to suit one’s needs. Genetic engineering is at the heart of the biotech industry’s thrust to remake life as we know it.

In terms of application, biotech has roughly three broad uses and these are namely:

• Agricultural Biotechnology (Agbio)
• Medical Biotechnology
• Industrial Biotechnology

Agricultural biotechnology mainly consists of the genetic engineering of plants and animals in order to create better, more efficient plant/animal products marked for human consumption. It is important to note that the deliberate attempt to alter plant/animal species in order to create improved varieties has been a part and parcel of farming for more than 7,000 years. Genetic engineering and biotech just bring a level of precision to this important farming activity that was impossible to attain before the biotech age. Nevertheless, the genetic manipulation of plants and animals has sparked controversies in different parts of the globe and it continues to be a challenge that the Agbio industry continues to wrestle with. A controversy relevant to Africa is that there are fears that Agbio might create a dependency where third world farmers are dependent on western biotech firms for genetically engineered seedlings.

Medical biotechnology mostly involves the harnessing of Recombinant DNA technology in order to develop solutions in the fields of medicine and healthcare. A heavy user of medical biotechnology is the pharmaceutical industry where a very clear pattern of division of labor exists. Government labs and small biotech firms almost exclusively do all the R & D, while large pharmaceutical firms (Big Pharma) with their financial muscle handle marketing and distribution of biotech products. The biotech industry got started in 1978 when Genentech signed an agreement to produce genetically engineered insulin for large pharmaceutical firm, Eli Lilly.

Industrial biotechnology is the application of biotechnology to the sustainable production of materials, chemicals, and fuels using living cells and enzymes. It has a broad application across many areas including:

• Chemicals
• Food and feed
• Paper and pulp
• Textiles
• Bioenergy
• Materials and Polymers

A notable achievement of industrial biotechnology has been the production of biofuels particularly in Brazil.

I wouldn’t be able to sign off on this article without noting biotech’s effect on the popular imagination through the medium of entertainment. By far most influential of course, in this area is the series of Jurassic Park films of which there are seven in total. Originally inspired by the novels of scientific thriller writing genius, Michael Crichton, the movies have become a staple of global popular culture. Their plots center on dinosaurs that have been brought back into existence using genetic engineering techniques. 

In an amazing case of life imitating art, there is a real life project to bring the woolly mammoth back from extinction. The plan is to genetically engineer Asian elephants who happen to be the closest living relative of the wooly mammoth, to have mammoth characteristics and place them in the Artic in a bid to restore that region’s ecosystem and combat climate change. The project is aiming for the first mammoths to appear in 2028.

I have marked the year down.

Bibliography

1. Smith, John E. 1996 Biotechnology Third Edition Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
2. Oliver Richard W. 2000 The Coming Biotech Age: The Business of Bio-Materials New York: McGraw-Hill

“Software is eating the world.” This emphatic statement was made in 2011 by Marc Andreesen, cofounder of Silicon Valley Venture Capital firm, Andreesen Horowitz. Andreesen, an ace software engineer himself, back in 1993/4/5 as cofounder of pioneering internet company Netscape, led the development of its breakthrough browser, Netscape Navigator, which opened the internet to the masses by introducing crucial user-friendly features that seriously lowered the technical bar for getting around the web successfully.

The reason Andreesen made that statement was because unlike the pre-internet software giants like Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM who mainly sold software to other industries, the biggest post-internet software giants, the most notable being Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google, the so-called FANG, primarily invade other industries, competing with the traditional players in that industry, and transform the industry beyond recognition. Let’s look at each FANG member, starting with Amazon.

Amazon is a retail giant, selling virtually there is to be sold via the internet using innovative software. It didn’t originally build its software to sell to companies in other industries though it now has a hugely profitable side business doing that (Amazon Web Services) but only it realized that after taking care of its retail business, it had spare capacity that could be sold to whoever was interested in making use of computing resources available over the internet (i.e. Cloud Computing). So while Amazon is in the business of retail, it is at heart a software company, employing the same kind of tech talent the likes of Microsoft, Oracle and IBM employ.   

The same goes for Google. It is essentially an advertising firm and it has utterly transformed that industry. It too has turned its spare capacity into a hugely profitable side business (Google Cloud Platform). Like Amazon, its core employee base is comprised of software engineers.

Netflix, in turn is essentially a video club, movie theater/production company, and TV station all rolled into one. Like Amazon, and Google, it has transformed those industries using bleeding-edge software engineering.

Facebook like Google, is essentially an advertising firm, though to most of us it feels like the world’s largest social club, which is understandable given that mark Zuckerberg took as his inspiration (or so we are led to believe) the social clubs at Harvard University.  Like the other ANG members, its main employee base are hotshot software engineers.

Andreesen didn’t stop there. He mentioned Apple iTunes, Spotify and Pandora, software firms that are essentially music companies. He also pointed that, at the time, the fastest growing entertainment companies were videogame makers, again basically software companies. He also noted that the fastest growing telecom company at the time was Skype, yet another software company that was eventually purchased by Microsoft for $8.5 billion. It would be eclipsed a mere 3 years later by another “telecom but software at heart” company called WhatsApp purchased by Facebook for $19 billion. Andreesen even noted that software was eating much of the value chain of industries that primarily existed in the physical world, of which he gave specific examples like automobiles, airlines, agriculture, oil and gas, and logistics among many others.

Most importantly, Andreesen explained why all these changes were taking place. He noted that the computer revolution starting in 1940s/50s, the invention of the microprocessor in the 1960s/70s and the rise of the world wide web in the 1990s (in which you recall, he played a most crucial role), had all coalesced to make possible the technology required to transform industries through software on a global scale. Here in Nigeria, we have seen this most glaringly in retail (Jumia, Konga) and finance (Flutterwave, Paystack). We would do well to go back in time to unravel these revolutions.

We may have to further back than Andreesen. To 1843, during Britain’s Victorian age. A titled young lady of about 28 years, known as Countess Ada Lovelace, a woman with a fascination for both mathematics and poetry had just become a scientific collaborator of sorts to Sir Charles Babbage, the leading mathematician of his age (He occupied the same Chair at Cambridge that Isaac Newton had occupied when he was a Cambridge don). This had come about because some 9 years earlier in 1834, Babbage had conceived to build a large mechanical contraption he called the “Analytical Engine” that was supposed to be the world’s first “general purpose” computer, general purpose in the sense that it could be made to perform all manner of mathematical calculations. Babbage had previously in 1822, started building another mechanical contraption, which he dubbed the “Difference Engine”, which had he finished building would have been the world’s first computer. The Difference Engine was being built to only be able to tabulate logarithms, sines, cosines and tangents, but he abandoned this project once the idea of a general purpose computer struck his mind.

As a result of this collaboration, Ada Lovelace would make many seminal contributions to the field of computer science. First she would suggest that the Analytical Engine could made to manipulate other symbols apart from numbers like musical notes and artistic impressions. That was never achieved with the Analytical Engine because the project was never finished but that is something we take for granted in today’s digital computers. She would also devise what many people would consider the first published computer program and in the process of doing she was the first to describe how a computer could carry out a certain task repeatedly, a concept known as looping which has gone on to become a foundational construct in computer programming. It is for these latter two achievements that I felt compelled to include Ada Lovelace in this history of software.

Like I said earlier, Babbage never completed any of his machines, so mankind had to wait till the 1940s/50s for the first working computers. These were giant machines that could fill an entire room. I discuss them in a previous article. As a significant part of the development of this generation of computers took place during the World War 2 era, the computers were primarily used to calculate ballistics. Much of the programming needed for the calculations were done by women. One of the most influential was Admiral Grace Hopper who developed COBOL, the first programming language that could run on computers made by different manufacturers, but to do that she also came up with another invention, the compiler which makes it possible for a language like COBOL to be understood by computers made by different manufacturers.

The 1960s/70s brought the invention of the microprocessor. This enabled computers to be small enough to fit on a desk, thus microprocessors ushered in the Personal Computer (PC) revolution. Prior to the PC era while programming computers was always an activity that went hand in hand with the development of computer hardware, there did not exist a software industry as such because computers then were very expensive machines that only a few large organizations could afford and they tended to be programmed by the organizations that bought them.

The advent of the PC era made it possible for a software industry to come into existence because they were now cheap enough to be bought by many people. Nobody understood this better than Bill Gates. Born in 1955, he dropped out of Harvard in 1975 to found Microsoft in order to develop software for the emerging PC manufacturers. He made the deal of his life when Microsoft was contracted by IBM to build the operating system of its pioneer PC. Microsoft struck a shrewd deal enabling it to retain the right to sell the operating system to other manufacturers, knowing fully well that clones of the IBM PC were bound to spring up. They duly did and Gates rode this wave to become the king of the software industry and the richest man in the world for at least 13 consecutive years.

Another hugely important company in the PC era was Apple, founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Apple was different from Microsoft in some crucial ways. It had both a hardware and software division whereas Microsoft focused exclusively on software. It also chose to have its software and hardware tightly integrated so that you couldn’t have one without the other. Although this made for a better user experience, it was nowhere as profitable as Microsoft’s strategy. In either case, for PCs to really become popular, they needed what is referred to in the industry as a “killer application”, i.e. a piece of software so compelling that people will go out to buy PCs in droves. That killer application was the spreadsheet. The first one was developed by an entrepreneur by the name of Dan Bricklin. It was called VisiCalc and it was developed for Apple’s first mass market PC, the Apple II. VisiCalc drove the success of the Apple II. A competing spreadsheet program, Lotus 123 developed by Mitch Kapor, drove the sales of the IBM PC and its clones. It also quickly supplanted VisiCalc in the market but was itself eventually supplanted by Microsoft Excel in the early 1990s.  

By the early 90s, software was a very established industry producing some of the world’s wealthiest people like Bill Gates and Oracle founder Larry Ellison. But another major change was afoot. As software had become a very profitable industry, it was standard practice for software firms to withhold the software instructions, called source code, that made their products run, making it impossible for customers who purchased their software from modifying the software to suit their particular needs. This didn’t sit well with some idealistic types and two of them, an American called Richard Stallman and a programmer from Finland called Linus Torvalds, independently set out to remedy this. Their efforts would later merge (by merge I mean the distinctive works they produced and not they themselves). Both set out to build an operating system whose source code would be freely available for modification and that would also be free in terms of price. They would however approach their respective projects from opposite directions. Stallman, who being 17 years older started first. He built an entire operating system except for the most fundamental part called the kernel. The kernel is the part that communicates directly with the computer hardware. Torvalds started by building a kernel and by the time he was done with it, he discovered Stallman’s operating system on the internet and merged his kernel with it. The resulting complete operating system came to be known as Linux.

Torvalds did another unusual thing. As he was building his kernel, he was releasing the source code regularly on the internet for other programmers to tinker. They would soon be making improvements and wholly new contributions were being added. This continued after he had merged his kernel with Stallman’s operating system and the result was that a new movement was born known as the open-source movement where far-flung programmers who didn’t know each other collaborated over the internet to build software and make it freely available over the internet. From the work of Stallman and Torvalds, the open-source movement has grown to become the center of the billion-dollar software industry. Even the biggest tech companies today regularly release open-source software sometimes along with their paid for offerings.

The open source movement wasn’t the only major development of the early 90s. At a European particle physics research center, a British programmer by the name of Tim Berners Lee was busy crafting what would become the World Wide Web. Originally built to enable researchers easily information, it, in a few years became the dominant platform for computing, supplanting the desktop where software built for the desktop was installed on the desktop. The Web was grafted onto the internet which had been in existence since the 1960s but was foreboding place for computer novices because it required a high level of technical mastery to navigate. The Web made it easy for ordinary computer users to surf the internet. Some of the key developments that made the web user-friendly were made by the person we started this article with…Marc Andreesen. So we have come full circle.

The software industry is still growing by leaps and bounds. The most interesting development today is of course the emergence of AI (which itself has a fairly long history). Whatever comes next, we can be sure of one thing…software will continue to eat the world.

Bibliography

1. Andreesen Marc. 2011 ‘Software is Eating the World’ https://a16z.com/why-software-is-eating-the-world/
2. Isaacson, Walter. 2014 Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution London: Simon & Schuster

I have spent some time discussing computing megatrends. I had previously looked at the explosion in computer processing and bandwidth. Here, I will be looking at the corresponding explosive trends in digital storage. Together, these three megatrends are responsible for the current age of extremely networked, ubiquitous computing that we are experiencing. Specifically, the unit costs of digital storage have been drastically falling such that storage density is doubling every 13 months without a corresponding increase in price. This is known as Kryder’s law, named after Mark Kryder, who made the observation in the mid-2000s and was at the time, Chief Technology Officer of Seagate Corp., a hard disk manufacturer. This has made digital storage ridiculously cheap, leading to the explosion in data generation.

It would serve us well to understand how we got to this point. It all started with the invention of punch cards in 1801. Interestingly this pioneering innovation did not first take place in the world of computing. It first took place in the world of textile manufacturing. They were invented by Frenchman, Joseph-Marie Jacquard to automate the weaving of complex patterns into fabric. Punch cards were made of thick cardboard or stiff paper containing holes arranged in a grid, with the presence or absence of a hole analogous to the ones and zeros of digital computers. Thus they were the first form of digital storage. Punch cards would be adopted by Sir Charles Babbage, an early computing pioneer for his so-called ‘Analytical Engine’ in the 1830s, which was a mechanical computer he was designing at the time but that he never completely built.

In the 1880s, punch cards would be repurposed by an American named Herman Hollerith for a machine he invented to tabulate statistics.  His machines were used by the US government to carry out a population census in 1890. Hollerith would found a company that ultimately became IBM.

The next major innovation in digital storage was the magnetic tape, developed shortly after the invention of electronic computers in the 1940s/50s. Magnetic tape consisted of a thin plastic coated with magnetic material. It also had features for magnetically reading and writing data from, and to the tape. Magnetic tape was followed by the of the magnetic hard disk drive in 1956. This was followed by the removable hard drive in 1963, which could be removed from a computer while the system is running. The removable hard drive made it easy for users to backup and transfer data from one computer to another.

The year 1971 saw the introduction of the floppy disk which was originally developed by IBM. The term ‘floppy disk’ was due to the flexibility of the diskette inside a protective plastic casing. At the time, the floppy disk revolutionized data storage and became the popular method of storing and transferring data.

In the year 1983, the Compact Disc (CD) would be invented. The CD could be read but not written to. The disc could hold large amounts of data including text, images, and audio. It functioned by inserting the disc into a CD drive, where a laser beam scanned the disc’s surface to retrieve the data stored in a spiral track. The data was transformed into a digital signal that the computer could process.

The next major innovation came in 1999, with the invention of the Secure Digital (SD) card, which is a small removable flash memory card that can contain high-capacity memory and is commonly used in digital devices such as cameras, smartphones, tablets, and gaming consoles. SD cards are characterized by their compact size, durability, and high storage capacity.

SD cards were very quickly followed in 2000, by Universal Serial Bus (USB) flash drives. The flash drive is a portable storage device that utilizes flash memory technology to store and transfer data. The flash drive consists of a compact circuit board enclosed in a plastic or metal casing with a USB connector at one end. The connector allows the USB to easily be plugged into a USB port, enabling data transfer. The drive is commonly used for data backup, file sharing, and software installation.

The 2000s also saw the introduction of Solid State Drives (SSD) which unlike Hard Disk Drives, contain no moving parts and are faster and more reliable.

The 2010s saw the emergence of cloud computing, and along with it, that of cloud storage. The major cloud computing providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), provide massive storage solutions and infrastructure. These providers operate vast data centers with an enormous number of servers to offer scalable and available storage solutions.

What does the future hold for digital storage?   The research into the possibility of using DNA as a storage device, but this work is still largely experimental. There is also research into using glass as a storage medium where data is etched into quartz glass using lasers. There is yet also research into using holograms to store data (A hologram is a three-dimensional, lifelike image created by the interference of light beams, which provides a realistic sense of depth that can be viewed from multiple angles without special glasses or lenses).

Whatever the future of digital storage, it is sure to be as exciting as its pasts.

It is no secret that the World Wide Web has experienced explosive growth since its humble beginnings in 1991. That was the year that the first website, for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) was developed by Tim Berners-Lee, the world wide web’s creator. Today there are over 1.1 billion websites (though only 193,890,945 or 17.32% are currently active) with 177,372 new websites created every day.

In 1993, the number of internet users was 2.9 million. In 1995, 16 million. By 2000, the number had climbed to 361 million. In 2005, the number of users crossed the 1 billion threshold. It climbed to 4 billion in 2018. As of 2022, the number had surpassed 5.5 billion users.   

This explosive growth in internet usage, would not have been possible without a corresponding growth in what telecommunications engineers refer to as “bandwidth”. Bandwidth refers to the amount of data that can pass through a transmission medium. Since the mid-90s, growth in bandwidth has been astronomical. Perhaps you might get a better sense of this astronomical growth if we compared to the growth in computer processing power.  

Computer processing power is encapsulated in what is known as Moore’s law, which is a rule of thumb formulated by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel in 1965, that underpins the entire microprocessor industry. It basically states computer processing power doubles roughly every 18-24 months, without a corresponding increase in price. The explosion in computing power as a result of Moore’s law made possible the Personal Computer (PC) era possible. Moore’s made it possible for computers to become small but powerful enough to fit on our desks, laps and in our pockets.

In comparison, bandwidth has been growing at roughly twice the rate as that of processing power. That means bandwidth has been doubling roughly every 9-12 months. Just as with Moore’s law, bandwidth doubling has had huge ramifications, launching us into the age of connectivity. It has made fast and ubiquitous internet possible.

The bandwidth explosion has been driven by innovations in fibre-optic and wireless technology. Those innovations were crucial in breaking through the bandwidth bottleneck imposed by trying to access the internet over landline telecom copper wires. Then (i.e. the late 90s), data transmission rates of 56.6 Kilobits per second (Kbps) were state of the art (These were the best of what were called dial-up modems). Today, we have Fifth Generation (5G) Wireless and 10G-PON (Passive Optical Network; a next-generation fibre-optic technology for residential and enterprise use) capable of delivering 100 Megabits per second (Mbps) – 1+ Gigabits per second (Gbps) and 10 Gbps respectively. In addition to that, you have internet backbones (The backbone is the part of a network assumed to carry the most traffic) running off what is known as Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) Fiber that permit bandwidth rates in the range of 100 Gbps – 400 Gbps per channel. These technologies have blown the bandwidth bottleneck wide open and ushered in the age of video on demand, cloud-computing, live-streaming, Internet of Things (IoT) and AI accessible over the web.

The future will certainly see more exponential data growth, with global Internet Protocol (IP) traffic forecasted to reach 1 zettabyte (1 zettabyte is about 1 trillion gigabytes) per month by 2030, and for mobile data traffic to grow 4x-6x between 2025 and 2030. A lot of this data will be AI and Cloud Computing workloads; data generated by IoT devices; Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality Metaverse applications. The data explosion will no doubt continue to encourage innovation on the bleeding edge of fibre, wireless and even satellite technology.

Bibliography

1. Gilder, George. 2000 Telecosm: How Infinite Bandwidth Will Revolutionize Our World New York: The Free Press

That we are in the digital age is something that virtually everyone knows but something very few precisely understand why. If pressed, people are generally likely to say because of computers, internet etc. It would probably surprise them to be told that computers actually existed before the coming of the digital age. Machines like the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) and others like it built in the 1940s and 1950s were computers but they were not digital.

They were analog computers. Analog because they use physical quantities such as voltage, electric current, pressure to represent and process data. In contrast, digital computers use binary numbers to represent data (that is digital computers represent data using lists consisting entirely of ones and zeroes) and the operations of binary arithmetic to process data.

What’s more, the analog computers of the yester decades look nothing like the digital computers of today. The analog computers were big, hulking machines, often filling an entire room, while some of today’s digital computers are small enough to fit on your laps (your laptop) or even your pocket (your smart phone, IPod or even your pocket calculator).

The story of the digital age is how computers went from being ugly giant monsters filling an entire room to sleek devices that were small enough to fit on your desk, then your laps, and then your pocket (And if the right breakthroughs are made in nanotechnology, computers might just become implantable/injectable in the future). That miniaturization was made possible because of some key inventions. Those inventions are, in chronological order, the transistor, the Integrated Circuit (IC) otherwise known as the microchip, and the microprocessor.

The primary reason analog computers were so big was because of a key component known as the vacuum tube. A vacuum tube is an electronic device that controls the flow of electric current within a vacuum. Vacuum tubes were physically big and many of them were required.

The ENIAC for instance required about 18,000 vacuum tubes. Moreover, vacuum tubes generated a lot of heat and so extensive cooling systems were required to cool analog computers further increasing their size. Needless to say, the early analog computers were very expensive and there only a few of them because only very large corporations could afford them.

For computers (and us) to enter the digital age, a fundamental technical breakthrough was needed to replace the vacuum tube with something much smaller but just as effective. The first major figure to articulate the vision of the kind of breakthrough needed was a professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), by the name of Carver Mead. Mead did not come up with the breakthrough but he provided much of the theoretical understanding for the breakthrough to happen. The breakthrough itself, was the invention of the transistor.

The transistor was invented in 1947 at an organization known as Bell labs, which was the research arm of the then telecom monopoly American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T). It was invented by a trio of scientists who went by the names of William Shockley, Walter Brattain and John Bardeen (actually it was invented by just Brattain and Bardeen but Shockley was their boss and he eventually came up with some elegant improvements to the original design).

The transistor was a tiny device that could amplify an electric current, and switch it on or off. This switching, is what enables a computer to compute. The “on” and “off” states represent the ones and zeroes described earlier. In other words, the transistors carry out the binary arithmetic operations of the computer described earlier.

The more transistors there are, the faster the computer is able to carry out binary arithmetic. So the primary task of the digital age has been to constantly shrink the size of transistors and cram evermore of them into computers, thus giving us computers that get smaller but are yet more powerful than their predecessors.

After the invention of the transistor, much work was done in the following decade to continue to miniaturize them. By 1958, the possibility of having millions of them etched on a single tiny chip the size of a short toothpick became feasible, and so it happened. This was the next major innovation of the digital age after the transistor and it was dubbed the Integrated Circuit, also known as the “microchip”. The microchip would enable computers to become even smaller.

The microchip was the work of two men working independently, each unaware of the other’s work. They would each come up with their first microchip roughly within 6 months of each other. The first was named Jack Kilby who worked at a company called Texas Instruments and the second was called Robert Noyce who worked at a very seminal company in Silicon Valley and of the digital age in general called Fairchild Semiconductor. Kilby would get there first but Noyce’s design was a lot more elegant and thus became the industry standard for microchips.    

In 1968, Noyce would begin to tire of Fairchild and was seeking an exit. Backed by venture capital and together with two colleagues named Gordon Moore and Andy Grove, he would start a company called Integrated Electronics Corp which was eventually shortened to Intel. 

Now up to that point, microchips were built to carry out one, specific computing application. In 1969, and early Intel employee named Ted Hoff would conceive an idea that would radically reinvent the industry yet again. It occurred to him while working on a hand-held calculator project that required him to build 12 microchips, each for the specific function, that he could build one general, all-purpose chip that could be programmed to carry out all the various functions of the hand-held calculator. This was essentially a “computer-on-a-chip”, and thus it was named the microprocessor.

The microprocessor would soon make its way into a variety of electronic devices and mostly importantly, it would again make computers smaller and become the personal items that now sit on our desks and laps. Intel would dominate the microprocessor industry for decades.

Fast-forward to today and yet again, major changes are afoot. With AI being all the rage, there has emerged a huge demand for specialized chips that can handle AI workloads. Intel has seen itself slip behind competitors like Nvidia in this space. Nvidia recently achieved a trillion-dollar stock market valuation on account of its Graphic Processing Units (GPUs).

These are special chips used for rendering graphics in video games and animated movies. It since been accidentally discovered that they are also highly suitable for AI workloads. Google has built chips specifically targeting AI known as tensor Processing Units (TPUs). One thing that we can be sure of is that microprocessors will continue to evolve to fulfill the need of exciting new markets.

Bibliography

1. Gilder, George. 1990 Microcosm: A Prescient Look Inside the Expanding Universe of Economic, Social, and Technological Possibilities Within the World of the Silicon Chip New York: Touchstone
2.  Isaacson, Walter. 2015 The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution London: Simon and Schuster