Stewart Brand’s belief in technology helped shape Silicon Valley
Apr 6th 2022 Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand. By John Markoff. Penguin Press; 416 pages; $32 Only one person may be able to claim credit for the popularity of both the Grateful Dead and space colonisation: Stewart Brand. He is best known as the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog (pictured below), […]
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Why Is Silicon Valley Still Waiting for the Next Big Thing?
In the fall of 2019, Google told the world it had reached “quantum supremacy.” It was a significant scientific milestone that some compared to the first flight at Kitty Hawk. Harnessing the mysterious powers of quantum mechanics, Google had built a computer that needed only three minutes and 20 seconds to perform a calculation that […]
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The Roots of Silicon Valley, Part 2: Planar Technology, The Fairchildren
//php echo do_shortcode(‘[responsivevoice_button voice=”US English Male” buttontext=”Listen to Post”]’) ?> In part 1 of this three-part series, we considered the birth of the transistor, how William Shockley Jr. ended up in Silicon Valley, the origins of Fairchild Semiconductor, how the pioneering startup was funded and what eventually happened to Shockley. In part 2, we look […]
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