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between programs, or the routines of subprograms, as necessary in order to solve problems. This meant that larger routines could be processed into subroutines, which themselves could be organized into templates to solve similar problems. In complex applications, programs could call up other programs again and again without the need of human intervention and could even change the subprograms to fit the application. von Neumann had invented block programming, the basis for the sophisticated engineering and business programming of the late 1950s and 1960s and the great, great grandmother of today's object oriented programming. By 1947, it had all come together: the design of the machine, the electrical power supply, the radio vacuum tube technology, the logic of machine processing, von Neumann's mathematical architecture, and practical applications for the computer's use. But just a few years shy of the midpoint of the century, the computer itself was the product of eighteenth and nineteenth century thinking and technology. In fact, given the short comings of the radio tube and the enormous power demands and cooling requirements to keep the computer working, the development of the computer seemed to have come to a dead end. Although IBM and Bell Labs were investing huge sums of development money into designing a computer that had a lower operational and maintenance overhead, it seemed, given the technology of the digital computer circa 1947, that there was no place it could go. It was simply an expensive to build, expensive to run, lumbering elephant at the end of the line. And then an alien spacecraft fell out of the skies over Roswell, scattered across the desert floor, and in one evening everything changed. In 1948 the first junction transistor - a microscopically thin silicon sandwich of w-type silicon, in which some of the atoms have an extra electron, and p-type silicon, in which some of the atoms have one less electron - was devised by physicist William Shockley. The invention was credited to Bell Telephone Laboratories, and, as if by magic, the dead end that had stopped the development of the dinosaur like ENIAC generation of computers melted away and an entirely new generation of miniaturized circuitry began. Where the radio tube circuit required an enormous power supply to heat it up because heat generated the electricity, the transistor required very low levels of powers and no heating up time because the transistor amplified the stream of electrons that flowed into its base. Because it required only a low level of current, it could be powered by batteries. Because it didn't rely on a heat source to generate current and it was so small, many transistors could be packed into a very small space, allowing for the miniaturization of circuitry components. Finally, because it didn't burn out like the radio tube, it was much more reliable. Thus, within months after the Roswell crash and the first exposure of the silicon wafer technology to companies already involved in the research and development of computers, the limitations on the size and power of the computer suddenly dropped like the removal of a roadblock on a highway and the next generation of computers went into development. This set up for Army R&D, especially during the years | was there, the opportunity for us to encourage that development with defense contracts Calling for the implementation of integrated circuit devices into subsequent generations of weapons systems. More than one historian of the microcomputer age has written that no one before 1947 foresaw the invention of the transistor or had even dreamed about an entirely new technology that relied upon semiconductors, which were silicon based and not carbon based like the Edison incandescent tube. Bigger than the idea of a calculating machine or an Analytical Engine or any combination of the components that made up the first computers of the 1930s and 1940s, the invention of the transistor and its natural evolution to the silicon chip of integrated circuitry was beyond what anyone could call aquantum leap of technology. The entire development arc of the radio tube, from Edison's first experiments with filament for his incandescent lightbulb to the vacuum tubes that formed the switching mechanisms of ENIAC, lasted about fifty years. The development of the silicon transistor seemed to come upon us in a matter of months. And, had | not seen the silicon wafers from the Roswell crash with my own eyes, held them in my own hands, talked about them with Hermann Oberth, Wernher von Braun, or Hans Kohler, and heard the reports from these now dead scientists of the meetings between Nathan Twining, Vannevar Bush, and researchers at Bell Labs, | would have thought the invention of the transistor was a miracle. | know now how it came about. As history revealed, the invention of the transistor was only the beginning of an integrated circuit technology that developed through the 1950s and continues right through to the present. By the time | became personally involved in 1961, the American marketplace had already witnessed the retooling of Japan and Germany in the 1950s and Korea and Taiwan in the late 1950s through the early 1960s. General Trudeau was concerned about this, not because he considered these countries our economic enemies but because he believed that American industry would suffer as a result of its complacency about basic research and development. He expressed this to me on many occasions during our meetings, and history has proved him to be correct. General Trudeau believed that the American industrial economy enjoyed a harvest of technology in the years immediately following World War Il, the effects of which were still under way in the 1960s, but that it would soon slow down because R&D was an inherently costly undertaking that didn't immediately contribute to a company's bottom line. And you had to have a good bottom line, General Trudeau always said, to keep your stockholders happy or else they would revolt and throw the existing management team right out of the company. By throwing their efforts into the bottom line, Trudeau said, the big American industries were actually destroying themselves just like a family that spends all its savings. "You have to keep on investing in yourself, Phil, " the General would like to say when he'd look up from his Wall Street Journal before our morning meetings and remark about how stock analysts always liked to place their 72