What made his free-range access especially remarkable was the culture of Silicon Valley—despite the superficial pizza-and-foosball looseness, the rival tribes inventing the digital future were manic, competitive, prone to extreme paranoia.

These chips are central to everything from facial recognition to self-driving cars, and that has set off a race to build the next-generation AI chip. Google and Microsoft—companies that had long avoided building their own chips—have jumped into the fray, alongside Intel, Qualcomm, and a batch of well-funded Silicon Valley chip startups. Facebook ha

Yet understanding the circumstances that led up to that unusual winter of 1947 at Bell Labs, and what happened there in the years afterward, promises a number of insights into how societies progress. With this in mind, one might think of a host of reasons to look back at these old inventions, these forgotten engineers, these lost worlds.