The Invention of the Circuit and the (Tentative) End of Atari (PCGH-Retro, July 30)

…1959: An important day in computer history: On July 30, 1959, Robert Norton Noyce, an employee at Fairchild Semiconductor (who would later found Intel with others), applied for a patent for his invention of the integrated circuit. Jack Kilby from Texas Instruments had already done the same thing in February – as a result there was a legal dispute between the two companies. Kilby and Noyce can be seen as the fathers of the microchip, without their invention later processors would be unthinkable.

…1996: The badly battered video game pioneer Atari is only a shadow of himself. He still doesn’t play a significant role on the games or on the computer market, the last Atari consoles like the Jaguar and the handheld Lynx were flops. The once big name is only good for a PR campaign by an insignificant hardware manufacturer: On July 30, 1996, Atari merged with the small hard disk manufacturer JTS. This deal was engineered by Commodore founder Jack Tramiel, who had run Atari years earlier. With the takeover by JTS, the Atari name temporarily ceased to exist and no more Atari products were developed – until JTS sold all trademark rights to Hasbro two years later. But Atari won’t stay there for long either.

…2001: Ati buys the Hydravision technology from Appian, which had previously been integrated into the graphics chip manufacturer’s Radeon drivers. The software allows multiple monitors to be used in parallel – soon the competitor Nvidia will follow suit with Nview technology and multi-monitor use will become the standard across the entire graphics card market.