When, in 1958, fifteen-year-old Bobby Fisher became the youngest Grandmaster in chess history, few onlookers would have believed that, one day, a machine would be capable of beating him.
After the invention of the transistor, electronic equipment became ever more complex. Thousands of different sized components had to be soldered together to make the circuits and were being crammed into less and less space. This was time- consuming, expensive, and unreliable. The Micro- Module program undertaken by the U.S. Army's Signal Corps made pre-wired building block components of a standardized size that could be snapped together. This still did not solve the core problem, however.
Texas Instruments were working with the Micro- Module project when Jack Kilby joined them in 1958. Before long he saw a better solution. As passive components such as capacitors and resistors could be made from the same semiconductor material as active devices such. as transistors, it should be possible to manufacture them in one process from a single block, or "monolith" of that material, thereby creating a complete or integrated circuit (IC). His germanium- based prototype—comprising a transistor, capacitor, and three resistors, connected by fine gold wire—was the world's first integrated circuit. A patent was granted in February 1959. Meanwhile, Robert Noyce, of Fairchild Semiconductors, was working on a unitary circuit, and his ideas regarding depositing the component connections directly during manufacture were key to the IC's development. Ultimately, the IC would lead to the first personal computer.
