Two Wonderful Inventions that Totally Changed the World The Weekend Edition of the Wall Street Journal of October 19-20 recently had a nice story about two inventions that in their words, “Remade the World.” The steam engine certainly is known to all of us who studied in elementary and higher school back in…
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How Do You Say Goodbye?
Some people, maybe you, are good at very intimate and personal ways to deal with pain and dying. I am not one of those people. I respect those with the skills and abilities to share the pain and transfer grace and comfort to those in need. In my education in engineering and business, the focus…
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The Rise and Fall of Motorola
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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