Technological trends

• Silicon Valley (California, USA)
• Route 128 (Massachusetts, USA)

• DEC
• Wang Laboratories
• Silicon Graphics

• Ken Olsen
• Steve Jobs

William Gates III

• 39 years of age (28.x.55)
• founder of Microsoft Corporation
• based in Redmond, Washington
• worth around US $ 8,000,000,000

• BASIC
• MS-DOS
• MS-Windows
• products for DOS/Windows
• products for Apple Macintosh

Semiconductors

• invention in the Bell Laboratories of American Telephone and Telegraph in 1947
• made readily available
• taken up by many firms (e.g., Sony and Texas Instruments)
• integrated circuits
• Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI)
• microprocessors

Moore’s Law

The number of transistors it is possible to put on a chip doubles every two years ... later reduced to every 1.5 years.

Gordon Moore, Intel Corporation.

In 1957 eight employees left Shockley to form Fairchild [Semiconductor]. In what has now become a high-tech legend, the eight sketched out a crude business plan and contacted Arthur Rock, who arranged financing from the East Coast firm Fairchild Camera and Instrument. Fairchild emerged almost immediately as a leader in the rapidly expanding semiconductor industry. In 1958 one of its scientists, Jean Hoerni, invented the planar process that made mass production of semiconductors possible. In 1959 another of the Fairchild's founders, Robert Noyce, coinvented the integrated circuit. And in 1961 its cutting edge R&D division developed the bipolar circuit. ... Fairchild's dramatic success exerted a powerful ‘demonstration effect’, initiating a trend of entrepreneurial innovation in semiconductors.

Florida and Kenney (1990) page 39.

FairChildren

• Rheem (1959)
• Amelco (1961)
• Signetics (1961)
• Molectro (1962)
• General Microelectronics (1963)
• Intel (1964)
• Advanced Micro Devices (1969)
• Four Phase
• Qualidyne
• Computer Micro Technology
• Advanced Memory Systems
• Precision Monolithics
• LSI Logic

Spin-offs from spin-offs

Intel is often pointed to as a victim of chronic entrepreneurship, and indeed past and current Intel officials have been among the most vocal critics of new spin-offs and start-ups. Roughly fifty Intel engineers defected to Daisy Systems, a pioneering workstation company. Most of MIPS’s microprocessor engineers were hired away from Intel. Zilog was formed by seven former Intel employees, and Sequent Computer Systems by eleven defecting Intel engineers. Seeq was launched by two senior managers from Intel’s Special Products Division.

Florida and Kenney (1990) page 86.

Innovative applications

• transistor radios
• telephone exchanges
• Walkman
• mobile telephone
• Electronic Point of Sale terminals
• hand-held electronic games
• Personal Digital Assistants

Breakthrough syndrome

The breakthrough economy is premised on the comforting myth that innovation is synonymous with technological breakthrough--a myth in which most Americans continue to believe.

The legacy of America’s ability to develop and, more importantly, commercialize breakthroughs is indeed impressive in the areas of mass-produced automobiles, radio, and television and more recently in high technology.

Florida and Kenney (1992) “The Breakthrough Illusion” pages 3-4.

Architectures

• component technlogy
• computer technology
• telecommunications technology
• software technology

Telecommunications

This can be transmitted in:

• 51.5 seconds at 64 k bits per second
• 1.68 seconds at 2 M bits per second
• 24 microseconds at 140 M bits per second
• ? at 5 G bits per second

National policies

• Japan: along string of plans over decades
• South Korea: sequence of five year plans
• Malaysia: 2020
• UK: consciously avoided plans since 1979

European Union

• ESPRIT
• RACE
• technology transfer
• training

Asia

South Korea's growth

Electronics has become its single most important source of export income, amounting to almost 30% of the value of all exported goods, and generating over a quarter of this nation’s Gross Domestic Product. Electronics has thus become a major industry in less than fifteen years, turning into a major vehicle of organizational and technological change and accounting for a substantial proportion of all manufacturing output.

Suarez-Villa and Han (1991) page 327.

Malaysia 2020

To become a fully developed nation by 2020.

In telecommunications this involves:

• privatisation
• introduction of competition
• increase penetration rate from 11.6 to 45 lines per 100 population in 2005, i.e. 15-18% annual growth
• mobile telephony to grow from 1.1 per 100 population to 10 per 100 by 2005

Alternative changes

• changes are caused not only by technology, there is also political and social change
• Industrial Revolution contra French Revolution
• what about the fall of Marxism-Leninism?

Integration and divergence

... the world of the late twentieth century is being moved by two currents. One, driven by technology and communications and trade, tends toward ever greater economic integration. The second is the revived tendency toward ethnic separatism, currently exacerbated by the collapse of a transcendent creed (Communism), the rise of religious fundamentalism, and increasing internal questioning (from Croatia to Somali) of national borders that were superimposed often from outside, upon very different ethnic groups; it is also exacerbated at times by economic fears.

Paul Kennedy (1993) page 287.

The fall of Marxism-Leninism

• a totally unexpected event
• the collapse of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
• the end of:
• hegemony in Eastern Europe
• the Brezhnev doctrine
• the Cold War
• massive social, economic and political change for millions of people
• truly revolutionary

The fall of Marxism-Leninism

• war in the former Yugoslavia
• war in the former USSR
• warlords in Europe for the first time in half a millennium
• major cities laid siege
• rise of nationalism and fascism
• diversion of investment from Third World

What caused it?

• economic collapse
• pressure of Arms Race from NATO and especially the USA
• failure to adapt to innovative economy
• fixed in mass production
• very poor economic coordination
• failure to deliver the (consumer) goods
• demonstrably falling behind

Soviet telecommunications

• very poor base in 1917
• failure to develop
• an instrument of the bureaucrat
• failure to invest
• inability to develop digital technology

I can think of nothing more subversive

Josef Stalin to L D Trotsky

Soviet computing

• copies of Western technology (IBM mainframe computers and DEC minicomputers)
• formal decision of CMEA
• spies sent westward
• very little software
• great secrecy

Conclusion

Judgement

• what are the driving forces?
• who controls or influences them?
• how important are these changes?

Readings

• The social shaping of Technology David Edge
• History, applications and projections Ralph Schroeder
• The New Space Race David Crosbie

URLs

• IBM Corporation
• AT and T