Integrated circuits consist of electric components such as transistors, resistors, capacitors, and metallic interconnects manufactured at a nanometer scale on a silicon chip. Chip designers are constantly seeking to pack more components into less space making the engineering requirements of chip design almost an art. In the 1970s and early 1980s design engineers began to personalize their chip designs by leaving microscopic images etched inside the chips’ functioning design. These images took a variety of forms; company logos, funny animals, comic characters, or inside jokes between the engineering team. This hidden art helped to show that chip layers were correctly aligned and could prove that a competitor had stolen a chip design. Once chip designs were covered by copyright in 1984, chip art became a way for engineers to assert their individuality into the mass production of chip manufacturing.
This 21msp50/55/56 digital signal processor chip was created by Analog Devices Incorporated around 1994. The chip contains an image of a fire-breathing Godzilla.
U. S. Robotics' subsidiary company Palm, Inc. produced this Pilot 5000 personal digital assistant (PDA) in 1996. With a purchase price of $369, the Pilot 5000 had a Motorola processor that operated at 16 megahertz and 512 kilobytes of memory. A touch screen accepted input via a stylus pen. Unlike the Apple Newton released a few years earlier, the Pilot’s system of “graffiti” shorthand provided users with an effective text input system. The back of this Pilot shows the characters that can be “drawn” by the “graffiti” system. Default applications for the Pilot included an address book, calculator, date book, memo pad, and to-do lists that could be synchronized with a personal computer via a special cradle connected to a serial port.
Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated several experimental telephones at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876. This unit features a single electro-magnet and could be used both as transmitter and receiver. Bell approached the problem of transmitting speech differently from other telephone inventors like Elisha Gray and Thomas Edison. They were mostly experienced telegraphers trying to make a better telegraph. Bell's study of hearing and speech more strongly influenced his work.
Jack Kilby’s demonstration of the first working integrated circuit (IC) in 1958 revolutionized the field of microelectronics. Instead of using discrete transistors, resistors, and capacitors to form a circuit, Kilby’s IC design integrated a transistor, a capacitor, and the equivalent of three resistors all on the same chip. Kilby fabricated three types of circuits to test his idea: a flip flop, a multi vibrator and a phase shift oscillator. This chip is the phase-shift oscillator.
The first IC was made out of a thin slice of germanium (the light blue rectangle) as a bulk resistor and contained a single bipolar transistor (under the large aluminum bar in the center). It had four input/output terminals (the small vertical aluminum bars), a ground (the large bar on the far right), and wires of gold. The microchips of today have been improved by hundreds of innovations, but Kilby’s prototype was an important early step.
This teletypewriter model was made by John M. Joy of New York, New York and received patent number 676,137 on June 11, 1901. The patent was for improvements to a printing-telegraph receiver, “to provide a printing-telegraph receiver adapted to print lines transversely on a page of paper that can be operated with a minimum of power and at a high rate of speed, and one that is practically useful in connection with the distribution of news from a central station.” There is a label on the model that reads, “This unit is the property of the Page Machine Co., and is never sold.”
This Western Union Telegraph Company stock ticker was produced during the early 20th century. The ticker received stock information via a telegraph line and printed out a company’s abbreviated name and stock price on the spool of paper tape. After the Civil War, the volume of stocks traded rose sharply with American corporations’ need for investment capital. The 1867 invention of the stock ticker, transmitting up-to-the-minute share prices over telegraph lines, helped modernize the stock exchange.
Alfred Vail made this key, believed to be from the first Baltimore-Washington telegraph line, as an improvement on Samuel Morse's original transmitter. Vail helped Morse develop a practical system for sending and receiving coded electrical signals over a wire, which was successfully demonstrated in 1844.
Morse's telegraph marked the arrival of instant long-distance communication in America. The revolutionary technology excited the public imagination, inspiring predictions that the telegraph would bring about economic prosperity, national unity, and even world peace.
Research in Motion (RIM) produced this Blackberry model 957 Internet Edition in 2000. The first Blackberry was introduced in 1999 as a two-way pager before pivoting to become a device featuring an always-connected e-mail with personal digital assistant functionality. The Blackberry 957 came with 5 megabytes of flash storage, 512 kilobytes of random access memory, with an Intel 386 processor running at 20 megahertz. Blackberrys came with applications that included e-mail, address book, calendar, alarm, calculator, memo pad, and a task list that could by synchronized with a user's PC through the included dock. The Blackberry 957 Internet Edition was one of the first devices that allowed mobile web use and e-mail, now ubiquitous in smart phones.
Intel introduced its 8080A 8-bit central processing unit (CPU) microprocessor in April 1974. Generally considered as the first truly usable microprocessor, the chip ran at 2 megahertz and powered the Altair 8800 and the IMSAI 8080, two of the first Personal Computers. Housed in a 40-pin DIP package that contained 6,000 transistors, the integrated circuit could receive 8-bit instructions and perform 16-bit operations. This particular example is marked "8321"indicating it was made in the 21st week of 1983. The "D8080A" means the unit has a housing of black ceramic.