They would be Gods

摘要

In discussing the development of semiconductors in Silicon Valley, many roads originate with Arnold Beckman, the man who hired William Shockley away from Bell Labs and brought him to the San Francisco Bay area to establish the Shockley Semiconductor Labs of Beckman Instruments (now Beckman Coulter). Semiconductors had been around for several decades—odd materials that had the ability to conduct electricity under certain conditions. They are, Gordon Moore says, "halfway between insulators and metals. The wonderful thing about semiconductors is that you can control the amount of their conductivity through introducing impurities."