A Brill Calendar: February 6

A Question of Computing

Few officials of the Patent Office of the United States of America will have been astonished when on February 6 1959 a successful American enterprise, Texas Instruments Inc., filed all required paper-work needed for requesting a Patent on a new, minute electronic device as resulting from extensive research in solid-state physics.

Since the world’s first electronic digital ‘computer’, the ENIAC, had become operational in a laboratory setting in Pennsylvania, almost exactly 13 years earlier – when English dictionaries mentioned under that lemma just one meaning: ‘someone who computes’ and when transistors were not even invented, let alone available – this governmental bureaucratic organization, protecting the ownership of original and possibly profitable ideas and products, had been flooded by myriads of contraptions with a potential to improve upon a quaint by-product of the Second World War. This ‘by product’ was originally intended to produce with the speed of light data and calculations for advanced ballistics; called in French ‘ordinateur’, in German ‘Rechenanlage’ and in Dutch ‘rekentuig’.

But it is seldom that the absence of surprise in officialdom was ever less deserved. The minuscule object, needing legal protection world-wide in the eye of its industrial maker in terms of intellectual property, would be called by the following generation later (and by common popular acclaim) a ‘chip’. By then, in the early 1980s, the Arpanet, a rather secret electronic ‘network’, serving the US Military, and ‘onlie begetter’ of a later Internet, couldn’t have come into being without this ‘chip’.

Given sturdy English idioms, no neologism was created under better verbal auspices. This electronic ‘chip’ is a ‘chip of the old block’: an extreme miniaturization and embodiment of the grand total of previous Western mathematics, solid-state physics & scholarship; and it may have diminished metaphorically the mass of that block infinitesimally. Questions about its original volume remain.