4.6 2.1.2. solid state era  (Page 4/11)

In 1964, DEC introduced PDP-8 using IC Chips hence it had very distinct hall-mark of Solid State Era. It was a Table Top computer. Cost came down to $18,000. Clock rate was 667kHz and it had 4kB memory upgradable. Its machine cycle time = 1.5μs and one instruction took two machine cycle times hence 1/(2×1.5μs) =0.333MIPS. Therefore this Table-Top computer had 0.333Mega Instruction per Second processing power.

In 1965, Gordon E.Moore submitted a paper on the trend of packing density of components in an IC Chip. [“Cramming more components onto Integrated Circuits”, Gordon E. Moore, Electronics Magazine , April 1965, pp.4]. The paper noted that the number of components in integrated circuits had doubled every year from the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958 until 1965 and predicted that the trend would continue "for at least ten years". His prediction has proven to be uncannily accurate, in part because the law is now used in the semiconductor industry to guide long-term planning and to set targets for R&D.

1968 became another water shed in Electronic Device gradual evolution. Robert Noyce of Fairchild, Gordon Moore of Fairchild together with Andy Grove also from Fairchild established INTEL(Integrated Electronics) which was going to become the pace setter of Semiconductor Industry in the coming decades and it continues to play that historic role.

In December 1968, Fall Joint Computer Conference, San Francisco, Douglas C. Engelbart(1925-2013) demonstrated On-Line fully interactive Computer System. He sat on a stage infront of a mouse, a keyboard and other controls and projected the Computer Display on a 22ft high video screen. He demonstrated how a networked interactive computing system would allow information to be shared rapidly among collaborating Scientists. He demonstrated how a mouse which he invented four years earlier could be used to control a computer.

In 60s, mammoth unwieldy Main Frame Computer existed where a deck of cards had to be punched and fed into the computer. After a couple of hours of wait, the print-out of the result would be available. This why a Networked Interactive Real-Time Computing System was REVOLUTIONARY. NLS(the online system) allowed researchers to share information seamlessly and to create and retrieve documents in the form of structured electronic library.Text editing, video conferencing, hyper-text and windowing were demonstrated. This Technology was refined at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center(PARC) and at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. APPLE and MICROSOFT went on to commercialize and practically brought the Information Revolution in our Modern Life.

National Medal for Technology and Innovation in 2000CE was awarded to Douglas.This Award was for creating the foundation of personal computing including continuous real time interaction based on CRT displays and the mouse, hypertext linking, text editing, on-line journals, shared screen tele-conferencing and remote collaborative work. He created the personal computing component of the Computer Revolution.