Nexus - 0604 - New Times Magazine-pages

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We were very startled, naturally. We weren't certain what in If you look back at it historically, what AT&T was claiming fact was going on, but we're not ones to back down at American was that one day this "genius", William Shockley, was working Computer so we decided that instead of running for cover and tak- with a rectifier; he looked at it and he noticed it had unusual ing the picture down off of our website...because we kind of con- propensities, and there, bingo, he invented the transistor! He fig- nected that the two things might have something to do with each ured it out right there! And to verify that, the two other "genius- other...instead of backing down and turning it all off, we would go es" that they got to help work on the transistor, Dr Bardeen and Dr the other direction. So we moved the picture to a separate section Brattain, both said: "Oh yeah, I remember a guy by the name of of our website and created an entire website within our website, Case was [allegedly] talking about transistors in 1931, and I knew called American Computer Company Special Investigation. This back then we were going to have them." is what happens when you grow up in New Jersey! Of course, we That is the history of the transistor at AT&T prior to 1948, couldn't have rubbed salt into a deeper wound: "Some have other than claiming it was invented in December of 1947 by Dr claimed that alien technology was found on board a UFO crashed Shockley. Anybody believe that story? Me neither. And I knew, in Roswell, 1947. Very dramatic. Is it true? Did the US military because the administrative head of the transistor project was Jack discover something strange in the desert near Albuquerque, New = Morton—the man at whose house I was staying to go to school Mexico? Did they alter human history? Was the transistor one of | and whose sons I was friends with—and he often commented on those alien marvels? Click here for the original story." the fact that it was really a shame that those three idiots got We tried to be a little cute. We put up a picture, and if you go _ responsibility for the transistor and he didn't. And I always won- to our website it's still there. If you go to our main website, dered, because he too didn't possess the scientific ability to devel- , at the bottom of the page is a op the transistor. He was a brilliant man nav bar with a pointer in the middle of the who had invented the radiobroadcast vacuum corporate info products, catalogue, features, tube, the close-spaced triode, but it appears tech support, Roswell 1947, help. You can as if he was brought in to head up the project go to that link and click on it and it'll take to try to draw back the transistor in time to you to this special page which, of course, has radio tubes and the things that Shockley now grown tremendously. It has something I knew that there was talked about; and it was as if the whole thing like, we estimate, about 9,000 messages and something strange about was just a ploy and he might as easily have articles now stored within it. We started off th t S " b | been given responsibility and got the Nobel on one Internet server and moved it to five e transistor because Prize as Bill Shockley. Professional jeal- Q, 6 4 q 7 . oy? Internet servers, and now we are on one of knew Bill Shockley, ousy ? ; _ 7 our super-servers which consists of four . In any event, for most of my young life I groups of four Pentium XEONs and three and Bill Shockley was believed that the transistor had come from a different service-provider carriers and a H H government project and that they were just whole lot of communications just to handle something of a witless hiding its origins. Which government pro- the load. buffoon. ject, I did not realise until I saw the We get about, we estimate, three mil- Shopkeeper's Notebook in the posses- lion to three and a half million visitors sion of my friend, the consultant. a month to the site. And they're not There's no way he could necessarily people like yourselves, . ow, I'd heard a lot about open-minded, interested; they're kids have invented the Roswell in my life and I'd read from college, kids from high schools, transistor. the Project Blue Book books and I'd read a lot of books like Berlitz's books and so forth, but I was not some- one who believed in Roswell, who believed that a UFO had crashed at Roswell at the time, in any event. There I was, stuck with all this infor- What we did in the story was we iso- mation and having created this rather lated a few pointers, some of which minor scandal on the Internet...well, only I was privy to. One of them was that there was some rela- maybe not minor, with the Air Force coming to visit us. tionship between the government and AT&T that resulted in the Next thing I know, radio talk show host Art Bell sends science transistor's invention. I mentioned I grew up in the household of reporter Linda Moulton Howe to my office. She has to be there the head of Bell Labs, so I knew that there was something strange _ because she has to see whether or not our offices were actually military people from countries like Tran...I'm serious! I mean, we can track some of the addresses that show up in our logs. I didn't even know Iran had Internet! We've got a very strange reaction to our story. about the transistor because I knew Bill Shockley, and Bill broken into. A beautiful woman, very intelligent...she shows up Shockley was something of a witless buffoon. There's no way he at the office with a tape recorder. I'm exhausted...the weeks have could have invented the transistor. been going not so good lately, and we're still picking up the pieces The symbol for the transistor is made up of three pieces: of glass out of the sofas in the lobby. She sees the windows are positive, positive and negative; or negative, negative and posi- broken in the front and we have a wooden partition set up to try to tive...silicon dioxide doped with arsenic and boron, in 1947. keep the air out of the building, and she records me answering Now, in 1947, doping things with boron was not easy. It required questions about all this. I try to be as vague as I can and answer the sort of equipment that even Bell Labs in 1946 did not possess. the questions about what's going on here, and she talks about the They had this type of equipment at Lawrence Berkeley story. And next thing I know, she plays the tape on "Dreamland", Laboratories—but it would have taken thousands and thousands on Art's show. I swear to God, it was the strangest thing we had and thousands of man-hours to invent the transistor. ever seen happen! and Bill Shockley was something of a witless buffoon. transistor. 58 + NEXUS JUNE — JULY 1999 | knew that there was knew Bill Shockley,