The C|Net story in my inbox bore a subject line with the name “Jack Kilby.” Being perpetually overwhelmed with email as I am, I thought I saw the name Jack Kirby, the extraordinary comic book artist, so I opened the mail.

Okay, Kilby, not Kirby. I read the obituary anyway, then I Googled a bit and found this and this and a few others. I’d never heard of him. You probably hadn’t, either. Well, it’s not as if he’s a household name, like Paris Hilton. He only did work that had enormous impact on the entire world.

While he didn’t help create The Fantastic Four, he did invent a little thing called the integrated circuit, which pretty much changed everything about the way we live. As this Texas Instruments page on Jack explains, “It was this breakthrough that made possible the sophisticated high-speed computers and large-capacity semiconductor memories of today’s information age.” Robert Noyce of Intel came up with the same general idea six months later, but hey — everyone remembers Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, relatively few people recall that Buzz Aldrin was right behind him.

Heck, yeah, he deserved a statue. And that 2000 Nobel Prize for Physics, too.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 22nd, 2005 at 12:39 am and is filed under Internet Stuff, This 'n' That.