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serendipitous; in many instances the long-term value of the result of basic research is not known immediately. To truly achieve utility, there usually must be a fortuitous confluence of environmental factors, which in the case of most technological advances we would term an accommodating market potential. Consider the invention of the transistor; a device illustrative of mechanisms so profound that there was virtually no environment that could immediately exploit them or that could not ultimately be totally transformed by them. Were Shockley, Brittain and Bardeen searching for a better way to make computers when they began their research on semiconductors? No, they were searching for a better amplifier for long-line telephony signals when they created the first transistor. Of course, transistors make good signal amplifiers, but that barely scratches the surface of their ultimate utility. Whether driven by altruistic recognition of this fact or ignorance of the serendipity, AT&T, a telephony monopoly at the time, in agreeing to license this technology to all interested parties performed what was perhaps the transforming marketplace driven event of the XX^th Century.

Applied research on the other hand, is typically well directed to identify incremental enhancements of technological components. Basic research gives us the transistor while applied research gives us the integrated circuit. Together, they provide either new technology or technology enhancements that make things faster, smaller, more robust, cheaper, and perhaps all of the above. The situation is that for essentially all research, direction is provided by a confluence of the interests of researchers who possess the ability to derive new technologies and funding agents who possess the resources to support the work of the researchers. When the two are aligned, a viable research environment is enabled. Today, the primary difference between basic and applied research is whether the research environment intersects in any strong way with a specific market. In essence, basic research is aimed at areas with no currently known commercial application. Of course, at this point it seems reasonable to pose the question, “Why do we want to differentiate between basic and applied research?” Our reasoning is that to extract the relevant understanding of truly mutation class discoveries from basic research, one has to be subject to a religious type epiphany, whereas discoveries from applied research entail application of well-known mechanisms for their interpretation. We’ll consider this in more detail in Chapter 7.

Our comparison of natural change mechanisms with man-made change mechanisms is yet somewhat disjoint. The discontinuity derives from the differences in the languages or at least the language mechanisms that are used to convey the results of research based change versus the mutation or genetic change found in organic systems. For living material, the DNA molecule is the center of all change as well as the conveyance of all change. For computer systems, change can occur within a myriad of sub-systems that comprise the total computer and computer network. However, the utility with which such changes can be fed back into the product development cycle is heavily dependent on the design and manufacturing technology used in the current product generation.

As we consider the parallel of mutation and genetic adaptation with basic and applied research, we find it interesting to expand our speculation to encompass a parallel between biological and computer species. Consider the introduction of the earliest forms of the electronic, stored-program computers. The first large-scale computer, both in size and in terms of market potential and realization was the IBM 650. It was a drum memory machine. Drum memory was a forerunner of today’s disk drives, using a rotating drum-like surface of magnetic material onto which magnetic patterns could be imprinted and then read by a read/write head floating over the surface. IBM was first to market with its machine, and it sold perhaps a couple of thousand units for a price in the range of $200,000 to $400,000 of that era’s dollars. IBM’s primary competitor at the time was Sperry Univac and they had a similar drum memory computer that they placed on the market

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