Loss of knowledge in the early computer industry,

Robert Colwell's oral history, about the loss of knowledge in the early computer industry:

Eventually, Rich Lethin and I made a pilgrimage down to TI in Richardson, Texas and we said
as best as well can tell many of your chips don't work properly. And does this come as a surprise
to you? I half expected them to say, "what you are out of your mind! You've done something wrong.
Come on, you don't know what you're doing. Go use somebody else's chips." But no, they said "Yeah we
know, let me see your list." And they looked at the list and said "here is some more that you don't
know about." And we went "Thank you very much. This is what we needed." At lunch I asked them "how
did this happen?" and by the way it wasn't just TI. Their parts were no worse than anyone else.
Motorola's were no good, Fairchild's were no good, they all had this problem. And so I asked TI,
"how did the entire industry fall on its face at the same time?" We are killing ourselves trying
to work around the shortcomings in your silicon. And the guy said "the first generation of TTL
was done by the old gray beard guys that really know what they are doing. The new generation was
done by kids who are straight out of school who didn't know to ask what the change in packaging
would do to inductive spikes."