This month marks the 39th anniversary of Jack Kilby's creation of the world's first integrated circuit, or chip, at a Dallas laboratory in September 1958.

Mr. Kilby creation sparked off a market worth about $1 trillion a year, and has spawned such cultural effluent as the musical necktie and the singing birthday card. The small chip also allowed the development of the personal computer (the first computer was installed at Manchester University in the UK, ten years before Kilby's chip), high-speed digital communications networks, satellite transmissions and a mass of other electronic devices and systems.

Kilby's first integrated chip included the equivalent of one transistor, three resistors and one capacitor. A chip these days packs up to 125 million transistors. The integrated chip standardised electronic circuits in the computer, allowing mass production. It also allowed miniaturisation, which meant smaller devices could be built, and brought costs dramatically down.

In 1958 a single silicon transistor sold for about $10. Now $10 will buy 20 million transistors on a simple memory chip. Kilby, now 73, was working for Texas Instruments when he created the first chip (patent number 3,138,743).

Texas Instruments first used the circuits in the US military -- in particular the Minuteman missile -- then launched a consumer revolution when it began marketing electronic hand-held calculators.

Kilby left Texas Instruments in 1970 to work as an individual inventor and now focuses on developing a "novel solar energy system'' according to his home page on the Internet.

The chip concept is being developed in a variety of fascinating ways. Intel Corp. Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Motorola Corp. have joined forces to design a new technique for etching smaller patterns in silicon chips, allowing more transistors to be crammed into each microprocessor.

The companies will use ultra-violet light to cut lines one-thousandth the width of a human hair, or 60 percent smaller than the patterns in most chips.

They want to cram one billion transistors into a thumbnail sized chip by the year 2011.

And the most mindboggling development of all is the proposed quantum computer, a fantasy of a group of physicists and mathematicians working away on the smaller side of the world. The regular digital computer works by moving electrons through switches on computer chips, its "brain''. The switch is either on or off, a binary logic. A quantum computer, according to a recent article in The Economist, would use the vibrating states of ions, or of light photons, as switches. The quantum switches would have a multitude of states in which to exist, rather than being binary, thus giving more combinations for the logic needed, and a much faster computer.

As a neophyte user of the Internet I usually dismissed other people's fears about security and scamsters on the Internet. No longer. With the surf comes the flotsam. The Internet has become a magnet for the dirty side of life -- one more method for the scamsters to get inside your pocketbook.

The National Consumers League reports has received about 100 complaints a month this year about scams on the Internet, compared to 389 received for the whole of 1996. The scams range from $10 to $10,000 in losses.

The most common signs of fraud are extravagant promises of profits, guarantees of credit regardless of bad credit history, suspiciously low prices, and prizes which require up-front payments.

The ten most frequent fraud reports according to the League's records are: undelivered Internet and online services; damaged, defective, misrepresented or undelivered merchandise; auction sales; pyramid schemes, misrepresented cyberspace business opportunities and franchises; work-at-home schemes; prizes and sweepstakes; credit card offers; books and other self-help guides; and magazine subscriptions.

That list just about covers everything you'd want to do on the Internet. Check out the Internet Fraud Watch Web site (www.fraud.cor/1fw.htm) to make a complaint or gain experience about the cybercrooks.

How about this sad tale of society and a weird coincidence. The Associated Press news service reported last week a story about a woman who was put on probation for neglecting her three children while she spent up to 12 hours a day on the Internet. She pleaded guilty to misdemeanour child endangering. The police officers who came to her house noticed the entire place was filthy, expect for the area around the computer, which was clean. Her name? Sandra Hacker.

Internet (Bermuda) Ltd. has upgraded its connection between the Island to the US to "T1''. This capacity will help speed up the rate at which data is transmitted over the Internet to and from Bermuda. Previously the line had a speed of 768 kilobits per second (kb/sec). A T1 line has a capacity of 1536 kb/sec, or double the previous line. The company has 5,000 customers signed up for its Internet services.

Tech Tattle is a weekly column which focuses on technological developments and computer industry issues. If you have any ideas for topics or a business you would like to discuss please call Ahmed at 295-5881, est. 248, or at home, 238-3854.