How Semiconductors Were Made in America

hgoel•about 2 hours ago

It's genuinely so ridiculous to suggest that freedom and meritocracy (among other things) were why America was able to do this first. This stuff was before the civil rights act.

There are endless stories about Americans being sent to Europe needing to be told that they can't treat black people the way they do at home.

All of the chest thumping about being the land of the free rings hollow when considering how recent some of this history is. The current and previous president were alive when the civil rights act was passed!

LinuxAmbulance•about 4 hours ago

The bit about how semiconductors could only have been made in America because only America had the specific combination of freedom of speech, irreverence, pragmatism over dogmatism, meritocracy and welcoming outsiders is definitely an interesting idea, although how true that is?

johncole•2 days ago

How semiconductors were made in the USA

loxodrome•about 3 hours ago

All the key people in CS, EE, and Physics needed to invent transistors where in America at the time.

Why? Mostly because America has true individual freedom and low taxes, unlike Europe.

wat10000•about 3 hours ago

More because Europe had just spent half a decade murdering each other on a massive scale, and there wasn't much energy left for basic research for a little while after experiencing a couple dozen megadeaths and the various urban remodeling programs that accompanied them.

petcat•about 2 hours ago

Europe has had many decades since then to innovate in technology and they have still not done so. They are almost completely dependent on American and Asian tech. And that is not changing anytime soon.

So yes, it had something to do with WWII, but that's not the only reason.

For instance, Japan and South Korea were both equally devastated and yet they both managed to build world class technology industries in the aftermath.

dadoum•42 minutes ago

> Europe has had many decades since then to innovate in technology and they have still not done so. They are almost completely dependent on American and Asian tech. And that is not changing anytime soon.

You are stating that like this has been the state of things for a century. The dependence on American and Asian tech has been a gradual process, that accelerated in the 1990s and 2000s. Before that time, every European countries had their own tech industries able to compete with the tech giants (Nokia, Siemens, Grundig, Alcatel, Thomson, Olivetti, Philips, Ericsson, Amstrad and that's only citing a few of the ones that marked history forever, only in the field consumer electronics, a lot of them back in the day were competing but ended up fading away, and also others were everywhere in the tech industry before without being really exposed to consumers).

flohofwoe•about 1 hour ago

*rolls eyes*

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASML

wat10000•33 minutes ago

The irony of making this post on a web site is quite amazing.

guywithahat•21 minutes ago

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, you're right. We were large enough that we could find the talent, and the country was free enough so that private industry could drive innovation. Low taxes let companies reinvest. We know this is what happened because the success of free markets isn't a mystery, it's well studied and documented.

How Semiconductors Were Made in America

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