Archive for month: July, 2016

 

With some summer time on my hands, I am belatedly reading Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age, the story of the computer technology developed at Xerox PARC — the personal computer, the mouse, the graphical user interface, the laser printer, Ethernet, computer graphics and video, etc. (Xerox could have owned the whole thing, but gave it away to Apple, and then brought in executives from Detroit to kill what they had.)

Carver Mead shows up in the story — recalling for me his role in the book Microcosm, which describes how, at various times when the computer industry was stuck, Mead would come down from the mountains, gather a group of grad students at Cal Tech, and produce the next needed revolution. He is responsible for:

– VLSI (the modern computer chip)
– Silicon compilers (tell the terminal what you want a chip to do and it designs the circutry)
– CMOS (the sensor in cameras) Read more