Prototype Integrated Circuit up for Auction (for $1 million plus!)

(Wordpress version here)

A prototype of the original integrated circuit developed in 1958 by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments, and for which he won a Nobel Prize decades later, is going up for auction at the prestigious Christy's auction house in London and is estimated to bring $1 to $2 million. The integrated circuit was one of the most important inventions in electronics, allowing multiple components such as switches and transistors on a single chip. Today's computer chips, which are evolutions of the original integrated circuit being auctioned, have *billions* of components which provides for incredible speed and smaller devices.

The integrated circuit was the foundation of the establishment of Moore's Law, in which Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, stated that the number of components that could fit on an integrated circuit would double approximately every eighteen months to two years, depending on who you ask. That law, which has expanded to refer in a general sense to the evolution of technology itself, has held true ever since, even with naysayers aplenty, including one from Intel itself!.

To be fair, the most important invention in electronics was the Nobel Prize-winning development of the transistor itself by William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain in the late 1940s; the integrated circuit wouldn't have been possible without it and we would still be using vacuum tubes in computers that were as big as a whole room. It too went through a massive evolution as you can see from the images below: The first is the original transistor they developed, the second is a transistor from today. Progress!

The First Transistor

Transistors Today

Even so, I am overjoyed that a piece of computing history is expected to bring in so much, it shows that the history and development of technology has value and is appreciated.

On a side note, I was going to link to this article on Engadget that talked about the auction, but it was so badly written I had to find another. I couldn't even bring myself to use their header image, I had to borrow from hungeree.com instead.