May 1, 2007

Chronicling Moore's Law

Don't you hate it when people don't keep their blog postings up to date. Simply put, "I apologize". I assure you that the time has not been wasted. For example, I've been reading John Markoff's fantastic book "What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counter-culture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry". Each story presented in the book describes how a particular person's individual creativity aided in the development of the first personal computers and ultimately the consumer market that we are part of today. That each successive person in the chain of developing the components that we now treat as just another appliance had to be able to take what came before and perceive what needed to come next. This sort of informed creativity is rare, it takes time, and mostly it takes radical thought. The creative person must be willing to utter heresies and deal with the unwashed to become informed on what to do next. Still in hind-sight there's lots to criticize and we will never know if the extremes that took place were actually necessary. However, like all creative pursuits, there needs to be passion, curiosity, a bit a magic and showmanship mixed with mega-doses of drama to pull it off. "What the Dormouse Said" captures some of those stories. If you've got the time I urge you to read the book.

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