They Really Changed our Lives

Last fall, we used the occasion of Steve Jobs’ death to celebrate how he had changed the way we lived, shopped, acquired information, exchanged information and coexisted with others on our planet.

A couple of other passings last November and December received much less attention. But they were life-changers, too. Or maybe you don’t know the name Norman Krim? Jacob Goldman?

We have become extraordinarily complacent about the transistor revolution that has redesigned our lives in the last 30 years. There’s an entire generation or three that doesn’t remember when you needed a phone booth to make a call, or vacuum tubing and punch cards to operate a computer, or an envelope and stamp to send a letter or pay a bill.

But, as with most life-changing devices – the wheel, the combustion engine, the Botox injection – there had to be someone who said, “What if we tried this?”

Norman Krim was one of those someones. He did not invent the transistor (that was done by three scientists at Bell Laboratories, in 1947) but he did harness its everyday potential on a mass basis. He designed the first miniaturized hearing aids.

Of course, the hearing aid itself did not change life as we know it. But because it was such a niche market, Krim’s company – Raytheon – had more transistors (called CK722s) than it could use.

So, according to his obituary, Krim contacted editors at technical magazines like Popular Science and Radio Electronics to test the market for hobbyists.

“The result was that a whole generation of kids working in their garages and basements got to make all kinds of electronic projects,” says Harry Goldstein, an editor at IEEE Spectrum. Transistor radios. Guitar amplifiers. Code oscillators. Geiger counters. Metal detectors. “A lot of them went on to become engineers.”

Yes, and a couple of them went on to become Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

After leaving Raytheon in 1961, Krim bought two electronics stores in Boston. Two years later, the two stores had become seven when he sold the business, called RadioShack, to the Tandy Corp.

A month after Krim’s death, at 98, Jacob Goldman, founder of the Xerox Lab, died at 90. In the late 1960s, Xerox was looking to go beyond office copiers and Goldman – then Xerox’s chief scientist – proposed an open-ended research laboratory to explore the possibility of computers.

The Palo Alto Research Center was established in 1970. Its researchers designed a remarkable array of computer technologies, including the Alto personal computer, the Ethernet office network, laser printing and the graphical user interface.

You’ll notice none of those became part of the Xerox product mix. Years later, Goldman decried Xerox’s failure as part of a large corporations’ unwillingness to take risks. “Look at personal computers today,” he said in 1988. “It’s a multibillion-dollar industry today. And we at Xerox could have had that industry to ourselves.”

They didn’t. You-know-who did. But Goldman and Krim had planted the transistorized seeds. And those seeds grew to change the world. It’s still changing.