The day the machine learns to think

Within a few years this invention has changed our lives like nothing else before it. Nonetheless, its inventor is barely known… Robert Noyce is not as famous as Bill Gates or Steve Jobs— and yet he paved the way for them. The reason: In July of 1959, the 31- year- old physicist registers a patent for a “monolithic circuit,” the first integrated microchip in the world. In 1968 he founds Intel— and triggers the biggest technological revolution in history. Now there is hardly any area of life that is not touched by the superfast descendants of Noyce’s chip. The circuit was an integral and unstoppable step in our development, one we continue to count on as we advance.