More Is Less

Here's an excellent think piece about creating jobs in America, by Intel's Andy Grove.

One astounding fact from Grove:

Today, manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry is about 166,000 -- lower than it was before the first personal computer, the MITS Altair 2800, was assembled in 1975.

That means the tiny number of computers built by IBM, DEC and their mainframe competitors made more jobs in the U.S. than the flood of personal computers today.


The IBM 7094. Image from the Computer Science Lab's Illustrated History of Computing.