Motorola, RIP. I'm not a professional historian. Heck, I haven't recently stayed at a Holiday Inn Express so I can't claim any expertise in the field. (That line refers to the cool advertisements where someone mentions staying .... oh, you probably have seen that.) However I can say with some credibility that "I was there."…
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Reflections: From the Invention of the Transistor to Today’s Semiconductor Industry
On October 18, 1954, the first transistor radio appeared on the market. Transistors were a big breakthrough in electronics — a new way to amplify signals. They replaced vacuum tubes, which were fragile, slow to warm up, and unreliable. During World War II, there was a big funding push to try to update vacuum tubes,…
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Samsung, The Consumer Electronics Colossus
Until twenty years ago, Samsung was virtually unknown outside Korea. The firm, the largest of Korea's family-founded and run conglomerates called "Chaebols," the cornerstone of the original government-private axis on which modern South Korea emerged as a powerful economy following Japan's colonial domination, was founded in 1938 as a trading company. In the late 1960's it entered…
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