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Intel taught more classes than a college
The Intel Trinity
The story is in The Intel Trinity. When Intel went from inventing the integrated circuit to the microprocessor, the three men realized the technology was so important that it would scare their potential customers.
Teaching the country
So they stopped what they were doing and went out to educate customers, investors, and the entire country. At one point they were putting on more classes than the local community college had in its whole course catalog. They made it a top priority.
The AI comparison
The comparison is to AI today, where the people building the technology have not done much to explain what it is for. People in the field have talked about a 25 percent chance of destroying the world, or half of all jobs disappearing within a year, and have said far less about the benefits, how the downsides can be mitigated, and why people should have more power and personal freedom, not less.
How did the microprocessor come to exist?
Intel released the 4004 in 1971, a chip designed for a line of calculators made by the Japanese company Busicom. Federico Faggin, Ted Hoff, and Stan Mazor led the design, with Masatoshi Shima of Busicom. The 4004 held about 2,300 transistors and put a computer's central processing unit on a single chip. Intel later bought back the rights to the design from Busicom and sold it to the general market.
Why did integrated circuits lead to microprocessors?
An integrated circuit places many transistors and their connections on one piece of silicon. As manufacturing improved, more components fit on each chip. In a 1965 article, Gordon Moore observed that the number of components per chip had been doubling about every year. He revised the pace in 1975 to a doubling roughly every two years, a pattern that became known as Moore's law.
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