1968 - Technology

Technology

Intel is cofounded in July by silicon microchip coinventor Robert Noyce (see 1959) and Gordon E. Moore, now 39, who leave Fairchild Semiconductor (following the departure of its chief executive Richard Hodgson to ITT), put up $250,000 each, recruit their Hungarian-born protégé Andrew Grove (originally Anders Graf), 32, and start a company to make memory chips, using a new metallic oxide semiconductor process. Building on work that has created two types of integrated circuits, one for logic and one for memory (both random access memory, or RAM, and read-only memory, or ROM), Intel will soon produce the world's first microprocessor (see Intel 4004, 1971).

Sperry-Rand founder James H. Rand dies at Freeport, Bahamas, June 3 at age 81.

The "mouse" demonstrated for the first time December 9 makes it easier to move a cursor around the screen of a computer. Invented at Menlo Park, Calif., 5 years ago by Stanford Research Institute engineer Douglas Engelbart, now 43, the graphical user interface device was originally a mechanical unit whose first prototype was a wheeled block carved from wood in the shape of a small brick with one button on top and two perpendicularly-placed wheels beneath it for detecting vertical and horizontal motion; an analog device attached to the two wheels plotted their position on an x-and-y axis, and the device was wired to an early workstation; it was awkward to maneuver, but the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) tested it in 1966 and found it superior to other pointing devices such as arrow keys on keyboards, light pens, and knee switches. Its two wheels have been replaced by a single ball (see 1973).