What's Been and What's Ben

William Shockley is the father of silicon valley and he co-invented the semiconductor – which you computer has 50 to 500 million of that do all the logic. There is a google tech talk about the secret history of silicon valley that is ridiculous interesting. It focuses heavily on how WWII was the first electronic war. A few of the many interesting facts:

• 3/4 of the aluminum foil during WWII was chaff thrown out the back of allied planes to jam radar
• 40,000 planes were shot down in WWII, there are less than 20,000 planes flying today
• the Germans never jammed British radar because the British used a frequency the Germans considered too low to bother checking since it wasn’t very practical frequency for radar