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| didn't realize it at first when | showed those silicon wafers to General Trudeau, but | was to become very quickly and intimately involved with the burgeoning computer industry and a very small, completely invisible, cog in an assembly line process that fifteen years later would result in the first microcomputer systems and the personal computer revolution. Over the course of the years since | joined the army in 1942, my career took me through the stages of vacuum tube based devices, like our radios and radars in World War Il, to component chassis. These were large circuitry units that, if they went down, could be changed in sections, smaller sections, and finally to tiny transistors and transistorized electronic components. The first army Computers | saw were room sized, clanking vacuum tube monsters that were always breaking down and, by today's standards, took an eternity to calculate even the simplest of answers. They were simply oil filled data pots. But they amazed those of us who had never seen computers work before. At Red Canyon and in Germany, the tracking and targeting radars we used were controlled by new transistorized chassis computers that were compact enough to fit onto a truck and travel with the battalion. So when | opened up my nut file and saw the charred matte gray quarter sized, cracker shaped silicon wafers with the gridlines etched onto them like tiny printed lines on the cover of a match book, | could make an educated guess about their function even though I'd never seen anything of the like before. | knew, however, that our rocket scientists and the university researchers who worked with the development laboratories at Bell, Motorola, and IBM would more than understand the primary function of these chips and figure out what we needed to do to make some of our own. But first | called Professor Hermann Oberth for basic background on what, if any, development might have taken place after the Roswell crash. Dr. Oberth knew the Alamogordo scientists and probably received second hand the substance of the conversations General Twining had with his Alamogordo group in the hours after the retrieval of the vehicle. And if General Twining described some of the debris, did he describe these little silicon chips? And if he did, in those months when the ENIAC - the first working computer - was just cranking up at the Aberdeen Ordnance Testing Grounds in Maryland, what did the scientists make of those chips? "They saw these at the Walker Field hangar, " Dr. Oberth told me. "All of them at Alamogordo flew over to Roswell with General Twining to oversee the shipment to Wright Field. " Oberth described what happened that day after the crash when a team of AMC rocket scientists pored over the bits and pieces of debris from the site. Some of the debris was packed for flight on B29s. Other material, especially the crates that wound up at Fort Riley, were loaded onto deuce and a halfs for the drive. Dr. Oberth said that years later, von Braun had told him how those scientists who literally had to stand in line to have their equations processed by the experimental computer in Aberdeen Maryland were in awe of the microscopic Circuitry etched into the charred wafer chips that had spilled out of the craft. von Braun had asked General Twining whether anyone at Bell Labs was going to be contacted about this find. Twining seemed surprised at first, but when von Braun told him about the experiments on solid state components - material whose electrons don't need to be excited by heat in order to conduct current - Twining became intrigued. What if these chips were components of a very advanced solid state circuitry? von Braun asked him. What if one of the reasons the army could find no electronic wiring on the craft were the layers of these wafers that ran throughout the ship? These circuit chips could be the nervous system of the craft, carrying signals and transmitting commands just like the nervous system in a human body. General Twining's only experience had been with the heavily insulated vacuum tube devices from World War ll, where the multistrand wires were covered with cloth. He'd never seen metallic printed chips like these before. How did they work? he'd asked vonBraun. The German scientist wasn't sure, although he guessed they worked on the same principle as the transistors that laboratories were trying to develop to the point where they could be manufactured commercially. It would completely transform the electronics industry, von Braun explained to General Twining, nothing short of a revolution. The Germans had been desperately trying to develop circuitry of this sort during the war, but Hitler, convinced the war would be over by 1941, told the German computer researchers that the Wehrmacht had no need for computers that had a development timetable greater than one year. They'd all be celebrating victory in Berlin before the end of the year. But the research into solid state components that the Germans had been doing and the early work at Bell Labs was nothing compared to the marvel that Twining had shown von Braun and the other rocket scientists in New Mexico. Under the magnifying glass, the group thought they saw not just a single solid state switch but a whole system of switches integrated into each other and comprising what looked like an entire circuit or system of circuits. They couldn't be sure because no one had ever seen anything even remotely like this before. But it showed them an image of what the future of electronics could be if a way could be found to manufacture this kind of circuit on Earth. Suddenly, the huge guidance control systems necessary to control the flight of a rocket, which, in 1947, were too big to be squeezed into the fuselage of the rocket, could be miniaturized so that the 69