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value on the wrong thing. "Sure, these companies have to make a profit, but you look at the Japanese and the Germans and they know the value of basic research, " he once said to me. "American companies expect the government to pay for all their research, and that's what you and | have to do if we want to keep them working. But there's going to come a time when we can't afford to pay for it any longer. Then who's going to foot the bill?" General Trudeau was worrying about how the drive for new electronics products based upon miniaturized circuitry was creating entirely new markets that were shutting out American companies. He said that it was becoming cheaper for American companies to have their products manufactured for them in Asia, where companies had already retooled after the war to produce transistorized Components, than for American companies, which had heavily invested in the manufacturing technology of the nineteenth century, to do it themselves. He knew that the requirement for space exploration, for challenging the hostile EBEs in their own territory, relied on the development of an integrated circuit technology so that the electronic components of spacecraft could be miniaturized to fit the size requirements of rocket propelled vehicles. The race to develop more intelligent missiles and ordnance also required the development of new types of circuitry that could be packed into smaller and smaller spaces. But retooled Japanese and German industries were the only ones able to take immediate advantage of what General Trudeau called the "new electronics. " For American industry to get onto the playing field the basic research would have to be paid for by the military. lt was something General Trudeau was willing to fight for at the Pentagon because he knew that was the only way we could get the weapons only a handful of us knew we needed to fight a skirmish war against aliens only a handful of us knew we were fighting. Arthur Trudeau was a battlefield general engaged in a lonely military campaign that national policy and secrecy laws forbade him even to talk about. And as the gulf of time widened between the Roswell crash and the concerns over postwar economic expansion, even the people who were fighting the war alongside General Trudeau were, one by one, beginning to die away. Industry could fight the war for us, General Trudeau believed, if it was properly seeded with ideas and the money to develop them. By 1961, we had turned our attention to the integrated circuit. Government military weapons spending and the requirements for space exploration had already heavily funded the transistorized component circuit. The radars and missiles | was commanding at Red Canyon, New Mexico, in 1958 relied on miniaturized components for their reliability and portability. New generations of tracking radars on the drawing boards in 1960 were even more sophisticated and electronically intelligent than the weapons | was aiming at Soviet targets in Germany. In the United States, Japanese and Taiwanese radios that fit into the palm of your hand were on the market. Computers like ENIAC, once the size of a small warehouse, now occupied rooms no larger than closets and, while still generating heat, no longer blew out because of overheated radio vacuum tubes. Minicomputers, helped by government R&D funding, were still a few years away from market, but were already in a design phase. Television sets and stereophonic phonographs that offered solid state electronics were coming on the market, and companies like IBM, Sperry-Rand, and NCR were beginning to bring electronic office machines onto the market. It was the beginning of a new age of electronics, helped, in part, by government funding of basic research into the development and manufacture of integrated circuit products. But the real prize, the development of what actually had been recovered at Roswell, was still a few years away. When it arrived, again spurred by the requirements of military weapons development and space travel, it caused another revolution. The history of the printed circuit and the microprocessor is also the history of a technology that allowed engineers to squeeze more and more circuitry into a smaller and smaller space. It's the history of the integrated circuit, which developed throughout the 1960s, evolved into large scale integration by the early 1970s, very large scale integration by the middle 1970s, just before the emergence of the first real personal computers, and ultra large scale integration by the early 1980s. Today's 200 plus megahertz, multigigabyte hard drive desktop computers are the results of the integrated circuit technology that began in the 1960s and has continued to the present. The jump from the basic transistorized integrated printed circuit of the 1960s to large scale integration was made possible by the development of the microprocessor in 1972. Once the development process of engineering a more tightly compacted circuit had been inspired by the invention of the transistor in 1948, and fueled by the need to develop better, faster, and smaller computers, it continued on a natural progression until the engineers at Intel developed the first microprocessor, a four bit central processing unit called the 4004, in 1972. This year marked the beginning of the microcomputer industry, although the first personal microcomputers didn't appear on the market until the development of Intel's 8080A. That computer chip was the heart of the Altair computer, the first product to package a version of a high level programming language called BASIC, which allowed nonengineering types to program the machine and create applications for it. Soon companies like Motorola and Zilog had their own microprocessors on the market, and by 1977 the Motorola 6502-powered Apple II was on the market, joined by the 8080A Radio Shack, the Commodore PET, the Atari, and the Heathkit. Operationally, at its very heart, the microprocessor shares the same binary processing functions and large arrays of digital switches as its ancestors, the big mainframes of the 1950s and 1960s and the transistorized minis of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Functionally, the microprocessor also shares the same kinds of tasks as Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine of the 1830s: reading numbers, storing numbers, logically processing numbers, and outputting the results. The microprocessor just puts everything into a much smaller space and moves it along at a much faster speed. 73