Beset by Milestones
by Lindsey Vereen
We seem to be awash in significant anniversaries all of a sudden. P.J.
Plauger was kind enough to point out that this is the 100th issue of Embedded Systems Programming since the magazine's launch in 1988. He remembered this factoid because he has written 100 columns for the magazine. Yep, P.J. was here at the beginning and was instrumental in shaping the magazine, initially serving as consulting technical editor. Most impressively his column has appeared in every single issue since. That's an amazing number of deadlines to meet.
But the 100th issue of Embedded Systems
Programming is the least of recent and upcoming milestones. You recall that last year was the 25th anniversary of the first commercial microprocessor. In 1971, three Intel engineers, Frederico Faggin, Ted Hoff, and Stan Mazor, designed the 4004 for an embedded application, the Busicom programmable desktop calculator. The 4004 was a 4-bit processor that contained all of 2,300 transistors, was built on 10 micron technology, and ran at 108KHz.
You could argue that the microprocessor was a feat of
implementation rather than invention, and the implementation was made possible by the development of the transistor and the integrated circuit. As it happens, this year is the 50th anniversary of the transistor. A team made up of William Shockley, John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and several other Bell Labs researchers gave birth to the transistor in 1947. It was demonstrated to top management on Christmas Eve of that year and publicly announced about six months later.
The second major development that ultimately led
to the creation of the microprocessor has an anniversary coming up as well. Next year we celebrate 40 years since the invention of the integrated circuit. In 1958, Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments figured out how to put resistors, capacitors, transistors, and diodes onto a single slice of silicon. In August of that year, he built a simple version using wire bonds for interconnections. The following year, Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductors improved on Kilby's idea by devising a way to form
interconnections via metal deposition, making ICs practical to manufacture.
Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956. Kilby and Noyce share the honor (and patent rights) of inventing the IC. Hoff, Faggin, and Mazor have been inducted into the Inventor's Hall of Fame. But it's an oversimplification to attribute inventions just to the people whose names are attached to them. Technological breakthroughs depend on the work of many people. As one significant example, Robert Noyce's
creative solution to IC interconnections depended on Jean Hoerni's development of the planar process, which in turn was augmented by the work of other engineers.
One last milestone in the making (not in the same league with the ones above, of course) depends on the efforts of people on both sides of the Atlantic. There will soon be a European version of Embedded Systems Programming. Miller Freeman Inc. in San Francisco and Miller Freeman plc in London will jointly launch Embedded Systems Programming Europe as
a bimonthly magazine with a circulation of 20,000, published in English and distributed in the United Kingdom and continental Europe. The first issue will be available in May.
With that accomplished, we can devote our energies to getting Plauger to stick around for another hundred issues.
