What Happened on December 1st

W.W. Chandler is born in Bridport, England. He obtained his BSc from London University in 1938 by private study while working as a telephone engineer at the British Post Office Research Department. During the war he was responsible for the installation and maintenance of the Colossus at Bletchley Park. The Colossus represented the first electronic computer, however it was programmed by a mechanical switchboard. It was used to crack the German Fish codes which guarded the highest levels of German communication. Winston Churchill characterized the Bletchley Park team as the geese who laid the golden eggs but never cackled.

After the war, Chandler participated in the development and installation of the MOSAIC computer and worked on optical character recognition. He died on September 11, 1989.

Dr. Federico Faggin is born in Vicenza, Italy. He graduated from Instituto Industriale at Vicenza in 1960. He received a doctorate in physics from the University of Padua in 1965. In 1968 he came to the US to join Fairchild in Palo Alto where he developed the original silicon gate technology. The 4004 project brought him to Intel in 1970. In 1974 he founded Zilog, Inc. which produced a new chip design for the fledgling personal computer industry. After a short stint with Exxon, he co-founded Cygnet Technologies in 1982 and Synaptics, Inc. in 1986 where he was president. He is a recipient of the Marconi Fellowship and IEEE W. Wallace McDowell awards.