American IT leadership.

• Author: Rock, Robert H.
• Position: LETTER FROM THE CHAIRMAN

THIS FALL, America accomplished a great feat; perhaps not its greatest, but certainly its longest journey. No, not the finish of the 2012 election. The Voyager 1 spacecraft has become the first, and for now the only, human-made object to leave our solar system. This achievement has gone virtually unheralded. Now hurtling through empty space, Voyager will not reach the nearest star for another 40,000 years!

In 1977 Voyager blasted off on a mission to Jupiter and Saturn with onboard technology that seems rather quaint today, including an eight-track tape recorder and analog images of Earth's splendors. Since then our space program has not been so adventuresome. The last American to walk on the moon was in 1972. America's space shuttle was permanently grounded last year, requiring NASA to pay the Russians to carry American astronauts to the International Space Station. Perhaps reflecting a shift in technological prowess, America is winding down its manned space exploration just as China is gearing its up.

Have Americans lost their can-do spirit, innovative attitude and entrepreneurial verve? Not in the most important technologies of the 21st century, namely information technologies. Launched by Leonard Kleinrock, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and their cohorts, America has led the way in the information revolution.

Developed by American scientists in 1947, the first transistor was almost the size of a dime. Now a computer processor chip this size contains 2 billion transistors, and Intel makes 10 billion transistors every second. By 2020 the size of the computer chip begins to approach zero, transforming what we do and how we do it.

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