The Computer History Museum is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the integrated circuit , pictured above, with a multimedia exhibit called ” The Silicon Engine ” to explain why many claim the IC as one of mankind’s greatest and most important inventions ever. Using oral histories from those who experienced the creation and development of the integrated circuit, the Computer History Museum compiled a documentary on this invention that irrefutably changed the world. The year-long exhibit will feature examples of early transistors, the vacuum tubes they replaced, and early integrated circuits, as well as explaining who was behind the inventions, especially the so-called ” Traitorous Eight ” engineers that largely developed the IC back in 1959. After departing from the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, engineer Jean Hoerni and the rest of the ” Traitorous Eight ” moved to Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957. There, Hoerni developed the planar process which would become the foundation for the integrated circuit.

This video explains more about the SAGE system I wrote about last week , the huge Airforce used in the 50s to the 80s to make us feel safe from supersonic Soviet bombers. The video here has a lot of information. If you’re short on time, I recommend watching the simulation of how the system would assign and deploy fighter jets and surface to air missiles to each threat, which is at about the 20 minute mark. Here’s a transcript of a panel about SAGE that occurred at the Computer History Museum in 1998. I found this passage, about why they couldn’t use human spotters to warn of invasions, fascinating: And they saw lots of things! [Laughter] They saw airplanes — many of them were civilian; they saw birds; they saw all kinds of things, and most of them they thought were Soviet bombers. I mean, this was a scary period

Anyone who reads Giz probably knows that even though your data is “saved,” it’s still susceptible to the decay of whatever medium is storing it. According to one expert, the problem is nearly unsolvable. In an interview by David Pogue, Dag Spicer , curator of the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, noted that there’s no great solution to saving your data other than resaving it again and again. His best advice: …every five or ten years, you should move it onto a different format, like from VHS tape to DVD. And that’s fine, but then DVD is already obsolete, there’s Blu-ray, and so what’s going to happen in another 10 years?

Anyone who reads Giz probably knows that even though your data is “saved,” it’s still susceptible to the decay of whatever medium is storing it. According to one expert, the problem is nearly unsolvable. In an interview by David Pogue, Dag Spicer , curator of the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, noted that there’s no great solution to saving your data other than resaving it again and again. His best advice: …every five or ten years, you should move it onto a different format, like from VHS tape to DVD.