DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, if you want to understand why the world you're living in right now — the one with the phone in your hand and satellites humming overhead — if you want to know where all that started, well, you're going to need to go back. Way back.
Back to 1906, and the invention of the triode vacuum tube. That little device marked the birth of modern radio, and it kicked off what we now call the age of electronics. Then came World War II, and after it ended, engineers gave us the transistor — a whole new era of solid-state electronics, they called it.
Things were moving. But here's the thing about progress: it has a way of tripping over its own feet. As engineers designed increasingly complex equipment, they ran straight into a wall.
Interconnecting large numbers of individual transistors and other components to form electronic circuits — it was a barrier. A genuine, stubborn, slow-everything-down barrier. What the world needed was a reliable, cost-effective way to produce and interconnect all those components.
Technical research groups in the United States and abroad took up the problem. And then — right here, in Dallas, Texas — a man named Jack St. Clair Kilby went to work.
Kilby was an engineer at Texas Instruments, TI, and in 1958 he designed and built something that had never existed before: an integrated circuit with all the components formed in a single piece of semiconductor material. One piece. That was the idea.
And on September 12th, 1958, he walked into the semiconductor building on this very site and demonstrated that first working integrated circuit to TI personnel. Just showed them what he'd done. Quiet as you please.
Now, that moment — that conceptual breakthrough, along with work happening elsewhere — led to the development of the microchips that sit at the core of modern electronic products. Consumer electronics. Digital computers.
Defense systems. Global communications networks. All of it.
So the next time you're rolling down a Texas highway with the whole world at your fingertips, just remember: somewhere along the way, a man named Kilby stood in a building right here in Dallas and showed a few people something small. Something that changed everything.
What the marker says
The twentieth-century age of electronics can trace its roots to the 1906 invention of the triode vacuum tube, which marked the birth of modern radio. The invention of the transistor after World War II ushered in a new era of solid-state electronics. As engineers designed increasingly complex equipment, the difficulty of interconnecting large numbers of individual transistors and other components to form electronic circuits was a barrier to further progress. The need arose for a reliable, cost-effective way to produce and interconnect the components. Technical research groups in the United States and abroad began work on the problem. In 1958, Jack St. Clair Kilby, an engineer at Texas Instruments (TI) in Dallas, designed and built an integrated circuit with all the components formed in a single piece of semiconductor material. On September 12, 1958, he demonstrated this first working integrated circuit to TI personnel in the semiconductor building on this site. This conceptual breakthrough and work elsewhere led to development of the microchips that are at the core of modern electronic products, including a broad range of consumer electronics, digital computers, defense systems, and global communications networks.