Bob Widlar, who started at Fairchild, was my childhood hero. I literally last week built a power supply with a µA723, a 1967 Fairchild originated part (although mine was an SGS Thompson clone) because it's still pretty damn well one of the best parts out there even after 50 years. Good times. I wish I was born a lot earlier than I was if I'm honest.
Sometimes I hear a name all my life because of an invention/discovery, but somehow in my brain it's dissociated from the actual person because I know nothing about them. And when I finally do, I get this nice fuzzy feeling.
That happened again with Bob Widlar (Widlar current source was the trigger) for whom I knew nothing about, not even his first name, but I was happy to learn that he was such an interesting person. thanks
I’m pretty sure that “R&D facility in Palo Alto” was just Vic’s garage, at least for the first several months. My dad told me stories about all the guys coming over when he was a kid. That’s back when Los Altos was mostly orchards. We still have the workbench from that garage.
When I worked at the new Netscape Campus (which was partly built on the site of the old Fairchild Mt View campus) in the 90's there were still some buildings standing from the old days. The Wagon Wheel was also still there, afaik much the same as it had been in the 60's. Had lunch there once. Now all that's left is the superfund site..
In addition to all other greatness, I'd argue that Fairchild had crucial role in West winning the Cold War; Soviets did not have a silicon valley and they never got very good at semiconductor engineering. I'd imagine most people on HN can understand the importance of electronics and computers in 70s and 80s.
According to Boris Chertok (see NASA books, "Rockets and People"), a control specialist of the early soviet space program, the lack of good digital computers was one factor in losing the race to the moon. The early space missions were controlled by electromechanical sequencers, basically the technology you find in old washing machines. They did some marvelous purely analog systems for attitude control, though.
It led to the Soviet economy being unable to keep up with the arms race for one thing. It also made economic diversification far more difficult, which was actually their downfall. They weren't lacking for labor, their economy was wildly unproductive, just as it is today. It was overwhelmingly dependent on hydrocarbons.
It wasn't the arms race that bankrupted the Soviet Union. It was the dollar, which collapsed the price of oil. During the 1970s oil boom, the Soviets made the mistake of making their economy particularly dependent on oil. Paul Volcker's efforts to tame US inflation collapsed the artificial price of oil as the dollar regained its strength.
It's the exact same thing in concept that recently kicked Putin's oil economy into a recession. Namely, a strong dollar, in this case from the belief that the Fed is going to raise rates meaningfully (and beginning shortly after they ended QE). That recent strong dollar perfectly coincided with a record collapse in the price of oil, just as it did in the 1980s.
Here is the brick wall the Soviet oil economy slammed into (note the spike begins with the destruction of the US dollar under Nixon, and ends with Volcker's inflation taming via extremely high interest rates):
Without significant economic diversification, there was no chance the Soviet economy was going to survive such an intense shock. On the flip side, the US benefited tremendously by the collapse in the price of oil and the taming of high inflation. That combination helped to spark the mid-late 1980s economic boom in the US.
My dad was a civil engineering student in a former communist country from Eastern Europe back in the mid-1970s, and he tells me that even back then he had a teacher at university who told them, the students, that the following couple of years (we're talking about the late 1970s) were going to be decisive in the West vs. East battle, as in who's going to come economically on front will win it. Said teacher of his sure was right on the money, as in the early-to-mid-1980s proved: Reagan's putting things back on track for the US, Thatcher doing the same for the UK, the Soviet economic system collapsing.
He also tells me another, related story. Also back in the 1970s the Romanian communist authorities decided that the national metallurgy industry needed a revamp so that they decided to send a couple of university/polyticehnics professors to Sweden, to see how the metallurgic Swedish industry was organized and what they did better than us.
All is said and done, said professors spend time in Sweden, they study how the Swedes do their work, the professors do their job diligently and when they come back to Romania they write down on paper a marvelous plan about how to improve a certain section of the Romanian metallurgy industry. Their plan was indeed very efficient, as in they were suggesting some improvements that would have necessitated only 300 metallurgy workers to carry the work that was then done by 3,000 Romanian metallurgy workers (the Swedes were doing the same thing with 100 workers, but the teachers' plan was still an order of magnitude improvement over the existing situation). When the communist authorities read the plan they burst out in fury, called said professors in front of a party committee and accused them of wanting to put 2,700 innocent and hard-working metallurgy workers out of, well, work. And they were correct, as the town that would have been most affected by this improvement was in fact a mono-industrial one, right in the middle of the mountains, which had been first incorporated 200+ years ago when the Habsburgs were ruling that part of the country. So there was potentially nowhere to go for those 2,700 workers and their families. And, because of that, of course that the plan was thrown to the trash-bin, said professors had to apologize in order to keep their jobs and not 15 years later the whole system would collapse because it had remained stuck in the economic past.
It's funny because my dad was on the student committee (the communists sure liked their committees) that had to vet on those professors again after all was said and done (my dad had been a fervent believer in communism back in the day, in the meantime suffice is to say that he has changed his views). My dad and his fellow students from the students' committee were all on the professors' side, and one of their main defense points was to actually quote Marx and his idea about how in the promised communist future all the work will be done by the machines (or sort of) and that there will be no need for people to actually do any work. It's interesting (and funny) because the same subject is now being approached from the capitalist side of things (I'm talking about Universal Basic Income, of course). It would be really something if in the end the capitalists would be more inclined to implement UBI compared to the communists.
Looking mostly at the inflation rate in the late '70s - early '80s which the Reagan administration mostly inherited and which they managed to tame by the end of Reagan's first mandate, if I'm not mistaken. Don't want to get into politics, but economically speaking the 1980s were a pretty significant economic success for the US.
Random aside: In the end they mention an exhibit at the Computer History Museum. I have to say, this is a great museum, and if you ever have the chance to go, go!
They have a lot of great history, including the military/cold war type history of computing (things like computing fire control and artillery trajectories).
Bob Widlar, for reference, was quite a character: http://www.electronicdesign.com/analog/what-s-all-widlar-stu...