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COVER STORY:
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DECEMBER 29, 1997-JANUARY 5,1997 VOL. 150 NO. 26
. . . driven by the passion of
Intel's Andrew Grove
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Fifty years ago this week--shortly after lunch on Dec. 23, 1947--the Digital Revolution was born. It happened on a drizzly Tuesday in New Jersey, when two Bell Labs scientists demonstrated a tiny contraption they had concocted from some strips of gold foil, a chip of semiconducting material and a bent paper clip. As their colleagues watched with a mix of wonder and envy, they showed how their gizmo, which was dubbed a transistor, could take an electric current, amplify it and switch it on and off. That Digital Revolution is now transforming the end of this century the way the Industrial Revolution transformed the end of the last one. Today, millions of transistors, each costing far less than a staple, can be etched on wafers of silicon. On these microchips, all the world's information and entertainment can be stored in digital form, processed and zapped to every nook of a networked planet. And in 1997, as the U.S. completed nearly seven years of growth, the microchip has become the dynamo of a new economy marked by low unemployment, negligible inflation and a rationally exuberant stock market. This has been a year of big stories. The death of Princess Diana tapped a wellspring of modern emotions and highlighted a change in the way we define news. The cloning of an adult sheep raised the specter of science outpacing our moral processing power and had a historic significance that will ripple through the next century. But the story that had the most impact on 1997 was the one that had the most impact throughout this decade: the growth of a new economy, global in scope but brought home in the glad tidings of personal portfolios, that has been propelled by the power of the microchip. And so TIME chooses as its 1997 Man of the Year Andrew Steven Grove, chairman and CEO of Intel, the person most responsible for the amazing growth in the power and innovative potential of microchips. His character traits are emblematic of this amazing century: a paranoia bred from his having been a refugee from the Nazis and then the Communists; an entrepreneurial optimism instilled as an immigrant to a land brimming with freedom and opportunity; and a sharpness tinged with arrogance that comes from being a brilliant mind on the front line of a revolution.
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time-webmaster@pathfinder.com |
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