Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce

By the late 1950s circuits had a counting problem: every transistor, resistor and capacitor had to be made separately and then wired together by hand, and the more of them a design needed, the more joints there were to fail.

Jack Kilby, new at Texas Instruments and left alone during the summer shutdown in 1958, built a whole circuit — transistor, resistors, capacitor — out of one piece of germanium, wired together with fine gold strands. It worked, and it was ugly.

At Fairchild the following year, Robert Noyce arrived at the same idea with a better method: build the components in silicon and connect them with metal deposited on the surface, so the wiring is part of the manufacture. That is how chips are still made.

Both are credited, the companies fought over the patents for a decade and settled, and Kilby received the Nobel Prize in 2000, after Noyce had died. The 555 and the counter on this board are that idea: a working circuit in a package, with nothing to wire inside it.