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Photos: Integrated circuit celebrates 50th birthday

Innovators Gordon Moore and Jay Last address the crowd at the Computer History Museum during a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the integrated circuit.

James Martin
James Martin is the Managing Editor of Photography at CNET. His photos capture technology's impact on society - from the widening wealth gap in San Francisco, to the European refugee crisis and Rwanda's efforts to improve health care. From the technology pioneers of Google and Facebook, photographing Apple's Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Google's Sundar Pichai, to the most groundbreaking launches at Apple and NASA, his is a dream job for any documentary photography and journalist with a love for technology. Exhibited widely, syndicated and reprinted thousands of times over the years, James follows the people and places behind the technology changing our world, bringing their stories and ideas to life.
James Martin
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1 of 9 James Martin/CNET

John Hollar, CEO of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., welcomes an audience of hundreds Friday at the end of a weeklong celebration of the 50th anniversary of the integrated circuit. Today, the IC powers everything from the pocket-size iPhone to Google's giant server farms.
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2 of 9 James Martin/CNET

Gordon Moore's contributions to research and development, and his co-founding of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, led to some of the computer industry's most important computer chip innovations. Here, Moore speaks with reporters before appearing onstage Friday at the Computer History Museum.
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3 of 9 James Martin/CNET

Pioneers like Moore (pictured) and engineers who worked on microcircuitry in the late '50s were honored this week during celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the integrated circuit.
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4 of 9 James Martin/CNET

Moore (left) and Jay Last were two of the eight men who became known as the "Traitoruous Eight" after leaving Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory to form Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957. Fairchild became "the Google of its day," according to Leslie Berlin, Silicon Valley archivist for Stanford University.
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5 of 9 Computer History Museum

Moore's and Last's patent and engineering notebooks are on display at the Computer History Museum.
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6 of 9 James Martin/CNET

The so-called Traitoruous Eight, seen in an image from Friday's presentation, included Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, and Sheldon Roberts. The group got that moniker after leaving Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory to form Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957.
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7 of 9 Courtesy of Jack Ward and the Transistor Museum

Pictured is the Fairchild 2N1613, which came out in 1960 and was the first commercial planar transistor.
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8 of 9 Computer History Museum

The Computer History Museum has notebooks of Jean Hoerni and Robert Noyce on display as part of its collection.

After Fairchild developed the NPN mesa transistor, which had major reliability problems, Hoerni developed the first planar transistor in March 1959, and then engineered a stable planar manufacturing process.

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9 of 9 Computer History Museum

Jack Kilby's notebooks--on display at the Computer History Museum--contained research notes collected while developing the integrated circuit. In 2000, Kilby was a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physics.

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