“Bob came to me and said, ‘How about we start a new company? My first reaction was no, I like it here. Then a couple of months later he came back and said, ‘Now that I’m leaving, how would you like to start a new company?’ It put a whole different light on the thing.”

— Gordon Moore, in a new PBS documentary “American Experience: Silicon Valley” talking about Robert Noyce who encouraged Moore to leave their first start up Fairchild Semiconductor to co-found Intel Corporation

The PBS documentary looks at how a group of young transistor tweakers turned what was once futile farmland into what today is a thriving technology innovation center of the world. Here’s a look at what Intel co-founder Gordon Moore says in the documentary, set to premiere February 5:

Silicon Valley Before the Startup

The End of the Mainframe Era at NASA
nasa.gov

This month marks the end of an era in NASA com­put­ing. Mar­shall Space Flight Cen­ter pow­ered down NASA’s last main­frame, the IBM Z9 Main­frame. For my mil­len­ni­al read­ers, I sup­pose that I should define what a main­frame is. Well, that’s…

Thinking in Pictures, Scientific Computing’s brief history of graphics for general computers: 

“…the use of separate processors that are synchronized to a common system clock produced a composite result that could easily be attributed as magic.”

One key role in this history was played by a legendary chip designer of the Intel 4004, which became the world’s first microprocessor in 1971.