It's safe to say---is it not?---that all of us members of the Tampa PC Users Group are either computer nerds or aspire to computer nerddom? (I know I do.) But in order to arrive at that exalted place, we need a good foundation in the historical evolution of the microelectronics revolution.

Enter George Gilder and his book, "Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology." Gilder, a philosopher, writer and economist, penned his book exactly ten years ago. It was then a definitive roadmap for the upcoming economic and technological upheaval that continues to sweep over us all to this day.

The author, in surveying the tidal wave of change to come, waxed lyrical and poetic about a tiny object, the integrated chip, which would soon power all of our machines as well as our economy and our very civilization:

"Every era has its pinnacle," he wrote. "In medieval Europe, it was the Gothic cathedral. In the late twentieth century, it is the very large scale integrated circuit, the Gothic cathedral of modern America. Like a cathedral, it is wrought of common elements---glass, sand, and metal--- transfigured by human genius and art. Viewed through a microscope, the chip unfolds as a panorama of infinitesimal tapestries, as intricate and variegated, efflorescent and symmetrical, radiant and colorful, as all the glass and stone of Notre Dame or Chartres. Passing over for a time the issue of whether it will be comparably given to God, the feat of designing and producing a modern microchip entails craft, devotion, diligence, genius, and vision comparable to any artistic pinnacle of ages past."

In telling the amazing story of "the descent into the microcosm"---the creation of integrated chips in the realm of micron measurements---Gilder recounts the personal histories of a number of individuals central to the surging microelectronics upheaval. Some at that time were famous, some nearly unknown, but all helped to light the fuse of the revolution.

Central to that story are people like Carver Mead, an engineering professor at the California Institute of Technology in the 1950's and '60's; Dick Gossen, a refugee from Texas Instruments who headed up a company named Silicon Design Labs in 1984; Dick Oettel and Vince Corbin, students of Carver Mead who founded Seattle Silicon in 1983; Gordon Campbell, founder of SEEQ, an early maker of EPROM chips; Bob Widlar, an engineer refugee from Fairchild Semiconductor who jumped to National Semiconductor, became a millionaire and disappeared into Mexico where he "was said to enjoy 'the beach, the bimbos, and an occasional exotic smoke'." And plenty of others, each seemingly more eccentric and foresightful than the last.

Gilder's book captures the sense of awe that we all feel from time to time, as we contemplate our increasingly intelligent machines and participate in a drama that surpasses the Industrial Revolution in terms of the changes being wrought upon humanity's stage. The author, however, didn't always write about the microelectronics revolution. He started his career as more of an insightful sociologist, swimming mightily against the dominant trends in the 1970's. "Naked Nomad," "Visible Man," and "Men and Marriage" all pinpointed multiple causes of societal problems long before his views came to be accepted in the debate, if not conventional wisdom.

Then, in 1979 he burst upon the stage with "Wealth and Poverty," another seminal work that combined sociology, economics and politics, and which provided the intellectual blueprint for what came to be known as the Reagan Revolution. That political and economic program in turn set the stage for an economy that would give birth to the personal computer revolution and eventually undermine and destroy the communist empire, with emphasis on low taxes, less regulation, and more entrepreneurship and individual initiative.

Today Gilder has followed up upon his path breaking earlier work in "Microcosm" with further books on microelectronics and the microcosm, including "Life After Television" and the more recent "Telecosm." Both books are accounts of the imminent demise of "bottleneck" entertainment and programming, in favor of virtually total personal choice, made possible and practicable by...you guessed it, the tiny integrated chips that suffuse our lives today.

Whether Gilder's current prognostications will come true or not is still an open question. Yet there is no doubting that he saw and "called" the computer revolution before it was fully upon us. One reader of a recent book about Gilder, writing on the Internet, was moved to say that "I think Gilder will go down in history as one of the great minds of our time."

Want to see where it all started? You may want to try finding "Microcosm" at the library. Or, if you're particularly intent upon earning your wings of nerddom, you may want to go to Amazon, the online bookseller, where you will find that Gilder's "Microcosm" is...out of print! But they say they can find one for you from used booksellers. Why the book was allowed to go out of print, I don't know, because it's a *terrific* read if you have any interest at all in the scientific and technological changes that are reordering all of civilization. u