by T. R. Reid
Translating this to binary math, a NOT gate that takes in a “1” will send out a “0,” and vice versa. The complete operation of this small, simple circuit can be set forth in a small, simple logic table:
Because the operation of this circuit is a function of fundamental physical forces, there can be no other results than those shown in the table. Accordingly, a table like this is known to computer engineers as a truth table.
The standard approach to circuit design is to prepare the truth table that provides the desired result and then, using Shannon’s techniques, build a circuit that produces a result to match the table. It is simple enough, for example, to produce the truth table for the Boolean AND operation. As we saw in Chapter 6, the rule of the AND operation—typified by the sleepy commuter who has to get out of bed in the morning if the clock says it is 8:00 A.M. AND the calendar says it is a workday—is that the result is yes only if condition A AND condition B are both true. To state that logical rule in the binary terms that DIM-I can understand, the output is 1 only if input A AND input B are both 1. If either input is not 1, then the AND gate has to emit a 0. Set it down in a truth table, and the AND operation looks like this:
That table is a little more complicated than the simple NOT table we just saw. And it is possible for these things to become a whole lot more complicated. An AND operation, for example, could have three or four or eight different inputs. The basic logical AND rule is the same—the output is 1 only if input A AND input B AND input C AND input D, etc., are all 1—but the truth table gets more complicated to draw and to replicate in electric circuitry.
Further, different logic gates can be chained one after another in different combinations to achieve different logical results. In a common instance, a NOT gate is wired to the output of an AND gate, so that the result of the AND operation is directly reversed. This combination of NOT plus AND creates a new logic gate called a NAND gate. For various reasons, this has become the most popular building block of all for many computer designers.
To make a mindless machine like DIM-I add two digits and come up with the right answer every time, then, the circuit designer first draws up the truth table for a two-input addition problem. Since digital machines do their arithmetic in binary numbers, the truth table encompasses all the rules for binary addition:
(The 10, which is read “one-zero,” is the binary version of 2.)
Since people started building digital computational devices, standard circuits have been developed to replicate every necessary logic gate and every necessary mathematical operation. Engineers have perfected several different circuits that will produce precisely this binary result. The necessary patterns of switches are built into the corner of a microprocessor chip that does logic and arithmetic. Since DIM-I is such a simple device, it uses the simplest addition circuit there is, constructed with about a dozen standard gates. The electronic pulses flow into the gates in patterns representing the binary digits to be added. What comes out is a pattern of pulses representing the sum of those two digits— and a carry digit, if necessary, to be carried over to the next column.
And this circuitry comes into use when the control unit inside DIM-I notices that somebody has pushed the “=” key. Control now goes back to its temporary storage registers to find what the previous key clicks were so that it can do the computation. The registers record that somebody pushed the keys “3,” “+,” and “2.” So DIM-I now faces the formidable task of adding 3 + 2 and finding the sum. To do so, control feeds the 3 and the 2 (in binary form, of course) into an addition circuit, one column at a time:
Starting with the right-hand column (the 1’s column of the binary number), each pair of digits enters the logic gates. Because of the way the gates are wired, there is only one pattern of pulses that can possibly emerge:
0 1 0 1
(That’s a binary 5, of course.)
Now that the addition circuitry has emitted an answer, the control unit gets back into the act. It sends a signal to the output circuitry: “Get ready to display the answer.” The binary pulses flow in; current flows out along selected wires leading to the display. The chosen segments light up, and the binary answer to the problem, 0101, is translated on the screen to its decimal equivalent:
Ta da! In the most roundabout conceivable fashion, DIM-I has actually solved a problem. In the minute step-by-step manner of the microprocessor, the seemingly simple task of adding 3 + 2 has become a Cecil B. DeMille production, with thousands of extras following the director’s instructions to the letter. A problem any human mind could work in a flash had to be broken down for the calculator into thousands and thousands of individual instructions that led the machine by the nose through its paces.
Watching the way a computer has to go back to the ridiculously detailed instruction manual to check on everything it does reminds me of that wonderful scene with the two evil scientists in the Beatles’ movie Help! One white-coated scientist makes a mistake, infuriating his boss. “From now on,” the boss roars, “don’t do anything without checking first with me.” “Yes, boss,” the underling replies. Now the boss says, “Okay, come over here!” The underling starts to walk across the room. Then he remembers the rule that he has to check everything first with the boss. “Can I move my left foot?” he asks. “Can I move my right foot?” And so on. Naturally, this makes the boss even more impatient.
But of course, DIM-I is too ignorant to be patient or impatient. It is a tool, like a hammer or a screwdriver, and the only way it can do anything is to follow the precise instructions humans have given it, to the most minute degree. That’s why adding two numbers takes all those fetches and all those executes. It is a process that only a mindless mechanism could love. It is a process that only a powerful intelligence could have invented. But then, digital mechanisms were invented by the most powerful computer on earth—the human mind.
10
SUNSET, SUNRISE
A spectacularly rococo official document showed up in Jack Kilby’s mailbox in Dallas on the morning of June 27, 1974. Framed in a silken strip of bright red ribbon, affixed with a gleaming gold foil seal, engraved in a florid cursive script, and illustrated with an ornate etching that depicted, among much else, the American eagle, the stars and stripes, assorted machinery, and the headquarters building of the U.S. Department of Commerce, the document poured forth its message in a rich flood of legalistic prose:
TO ALL TO WHOM THESE PRESENTS SHALL COME: WHEREAS Jack S. Kilby; Jerry D. Merryman; James H. Van Tassel, all of Dallas, Texas . . . presented to the COMMISSIONER OF PATENTS a petition praying for the grant of LETTERS PATENT for an alleged new and useful invention the title and a description of which are contained in the specification of which a copy is hereunto annexed and made part hereof . . . and WHEREAS upon due examination made the said Claimants are adjudged to be justly entitled to a patent under the law: Now therefore these LETTERS PATENT are to grant . . . for the term of SEVENTEEN years from the date of this grant.
The specification thereunto annexed and made part thereof was, in fact, the patent application that Texas Instruments had sent off years earlier when Kilby and his “Cal Tech” team had successfully developed the first pocket calculator. With the formal receipt of the patent, TI could now replace the words “Patent pending” on its pocket calculators with the official patent number: U.S. Pat. 3,819,921—a legend that is still being molded today into the plastic cases of calculators turned out by Texas Instruments and other firms it has licensed to copy the basic Kilby architecture.
In sharp contrast to the long legal struggle over the integrated circuit, there had been no contest about the patent for the handheld calculator. Everyone recognized that Kilby, Merryman, and Van Tassel were entitled to the honor. By the time the patent was issued, however, the honor of the thing was just about all it stood for. By the middle of 1974, it was clear that Texas Instruments, and for that matter all other American manufacturers, had lost control of the calculator business. This revolutionary produc
t— conceived, born, and bred in Texas, U.S.A.—was becoming a Japanese preserve.
Given the Japanese dominance of other facets of the consumer electronics business, it was not altogether surprising that firms like Casio and Panasonic had caught and passed their American competitors. But it was still a bitter irony. By succeeding with the pocket calculator, the Japanese electronics firms had added a sour twist to one of the happier chapters in contemporary American business history.
Since its first appearance in the 1930s, the office calculator had been recognized worldwide as an American product. Despite impressive competition from European firms, U.S. manufacturers dominated the market. Then, in the 1960s, when a “calculator” was still a hefty, expensive, desktop apparatus, Japanese manufacturers had moved into the U.S. market and simply overwhelmed the traditional American office-machine firms. Japan’s market dominance increased steadily, and the situation was bleak for the American side until the day in 1971 when Jack Kilby’s first handheld calculator went on the market. The application of microelectronics to the calculator business completely turned the tables. The chip-based calculator—smaller, cheaper, and more efficient than any Japanese product—put American labels back on top.
This reversal was so dramatic that the Commerce Department issued a detailed report on the American triumph: “With innovative products and aggressive pricing policies backed by high volume production efficiencies, U.S. firms rapidly regained control of the U.S. calculator market from their chief competitors, the Japanese.” The report went on to say that this turnabout was “an excellent illustration of the way a free and competitive industrial system can provide benefits to the consumer,” and a model that other U.S. industries could emulate in their struggles against foreign competition.
Unfortunately, the United States was not the only place with a free and competitive industrial system, and American firms were not the only ones in the calculator business that knew how to practice aggressive pricing and production efficiencies. By the time Jack Kilby received his letters patent, Japanese manufacturers had obtained the information they needed to make handheld calculators of their own. In part, they developed their own calculator know-how; mainly, though, they borrowed American techniques, either buying or appropriating patented processes from U.S. firms. (TI sued Casio in 1982 for infringement of the Kilby calculator patent; the case was settled with Casio paying a considerable sum.)
In any case, the competition from Japan was so intense and so successful that, two years after its original calculator report, the Commerce Department had no choice but to issue an unhappy update: “Since 1974, the situation has once again been reversed. . . . The departure of U.S. firms from the calculator industry continues. . . . Japanese-origin calculator imports have again been a major factor in this downward trend.” When that was written, in 1977, the Japanese made about 45 percent of the calculators sold in the United States. By the early 1980s, Japanese firms’ share of the U.S. market, in dollar value, was above 70 percent. (By the turn of the century, both Japanese and American manufacturers had moved on to higher value-added products, and most pocket calculators came from China or Southeast Asia.)
As the Commerce Department noted, the pattern of conquest in calculators in the seventies was familiar to anyone who had watched Japanese firms make equally successful forays into U.S. markets ranging from automobiles to zippers. The Japanese had first moved into the low-priced segment of the business, turning out simple, “plain vanilla” calculators that offered the consumer greater variety, equal or better reliability, and lower prices than comparable U.S.-made brands. Having established a beachhead at the low end of the market, the invaders moved to broaden their territory. “All they did was take our product and add a bunch of bells and whistles,” a U.S. manufacturer complained. But the bells and whistles—not to mention the calorie counters, currency converters, perpetual calendars, astrology tables, biorhythm charts, and assorted other add-ons dreamed up by the marketing men in Tokyo—sold calculators by the millions. In the third stage of their assault, the Japanese set their sights on more sophisticated, higher-priced models that provided the highest profit margins. “This pattern of market activity,” the Commerce Department’s second report said, “has been observed for other products, such as television sets.”
The comparison to television sets had to be a frightening one for anybody in the U.S. electronics industry. Television was the paradigm case of international competition in modern electronics, but it is hardly a pleasant paradigm for American industrialists to ponder. Just about every significant advance in the development of television has come from the United States. Yet the Japanese repeatedly trumped the American genius for innovation with their own skills at production and marketing.
The ancestry of the television set can be traced to the work of several late-nineteenth-century European physicists who developed and perfected the cathode ray tube. The modern TV is a direct descendant of this device, a lineage reflected in the slang terms “tube” and “boob tube.” The cathode ray tube, originally built strictly as a laboratory apparatus, was a long, closed glass tube with a mechanism inside that shot a “cathode ray”—the mysterious beam of energy that J. J. Thomson determined to be a stream of electrons—down the length of the tube. At the opposite end of the tube the glass was coated with phosphor. An electron shot from the cathode gun raced down the tube and struck the phosphorescent glass at the far end. Precisely where the electron hit, the phosphor would glow with a bright point of light.
Peering at an interesting pattern of glowing dots on a cathode ray tube in 1908, the British physicist A. A. Campbell-Swinton hit upon the fundamental idea of television: the dots of light on the glass tube could form a pointillistic picture—the television image. (If you put down this book for a moment and look closely, very closely, at a television screen, you will see that the picture on the glass is actually composed of thousands of individual points of light, à la the French pointillist painter Georges Seurat.) Campbell-Swinton named his idea “Distant Electrical Vision”; the term “television” was apparently coined by the French. As every schoolchild in the Highlands knows, the Scotsman John Logie Baird pursued the idea with some success. But the real invention of television came about in the 1920s in a pair of American laboratories run by a pair of competing inventors who battled furiously to be first to perfect the concept.
In one corner was Vladimir Zworykin, an officer in the tsar’s army who had fled Russia during the 1917 revolution and eventually landed in David Sarnoff’s laboratory at RCA in New York. In the other was Philo T. Farnsworth, a fiercely independent farm boy from Idaho who would not sign on with any of the major electronics firms and was forced to scrounge constantly for money to support his research. (After years of work, and just on the verge of final success, Farnsworth retired back to the farm at the age of thirty-four—a classic burnt-out case.)
Spurred on by the whip of competition with each other, Zworykin and Farnsworth rapidly surpassed the efforts of Baird and other Europeans, and by 1929 they had developed, between them, a camera that could convert a visual image into electronic signals and a picture tube that could translate these signals back into the visual image. The heart of the Zworykin/Farnsworth TV—and of almost all television sets today—is a cathode that fires a moving beam of electrons toward the phosphorescent screen. The electron gun sprays a picture on the screen the way an aerosol paint can sprays pictures on the subway wall. The graffiti, of course, is on the wall for good; the television tube, in contrast, sprays a new image on the screen sixty times each second, creating the illusion of a moving picture.
Serious commercial development of television was delayed until after World War II, when the U.S. government finally got around to issuing technical regulations for frequencies, bandwidths, and the like, so that all stations could broadcast the same standard signal. In the first year after the war, 6,000 television sets were sold in the United States. In 1948, Americans bought 1 million sets; two years later, 7 mil
lion. The boom was on. Because American technology set the pace, the U.S. standards were adopted, with minor variations, around the world.
As their sales skyrocketed, U.S. television manufacturers developed a marketing structure not unlike that of another booming American business, the automobile industry. The major television makers—Admiral, DuMont, Sylvania, etc.—sold their products through franchise dealerships that generally handled only one brand. The dealers provided factory-authorized repair, an important function at a time when the family TV was likely to be in the shop as often as the family car. And they dutifully pushed the large console models that brought manufacturers the largest profit margins.
This retail structure made it doubly hard for new firms, particularly overseas manufacturers, to move into the U.S. market. It was the biggest and most lucrative television market by far, but there was no way for an outsider to break into the dealership system, which was controlled by the big domestic firms. Further, without a network of parts depots and factory-trained repairmen, how could an overseas competitor keep his sets in working order?
These problems persuaded the major European electronics firms to stay home. But the Japanese manufacturers, prodded by government officials eager to increase exports, took a long look at the United States in the early 1960s and decided to give it a try. On technical matters, the Japanese initially copied what others had done. The firms purchased the rights to more than 400 patents from U.S. and European firms and generally waited for others to make the important breakthroughs. In production and marketing, however, Japan did the innovating.
Japanese television firms approached the U.S. market with a wider variety of models than many domestic makers offered, including a line of smaller table-model sets and the first portables. By targeting the low-price segment of the market, they were able to sell their sets through the fast-growing discount chains, circumventing the traditional dealer network. To deal with the lack of trained repairmen, the Japanese eliminated the need for repair. They honed a highly disciplined labor force in their factories and introduced extensive quality-control mechanisms, so that Japanese television sets would work reliably without constant maintenance.