The "FinFET" design for transistors, developed at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1990s, represented a major leap forward in the semiconductor industry. Understanding its origins and importance requires deep knowledge of local factors, such as the relationships among the lab's principal investigators, students, staff, and the institution. It also requires understanding this lab within the broader network of relationships that comprise the semiconductor industry-a much more difficult task using traditional historical methods, due to the paucity of sources on industrial research. This article is simultaneously 1) a history of an impactful technology and its social context, 2) an experiment in using data tools and visualizations as a complement to archival and oral history sources, to clarify and explore these "big picture" dimensions, and 3) an introduction to specific data visualization tools that we hope will be useful to historians of technology more generally.

In the mid-twentieth century, businesses around the world began to see technical know-how as one of the most important assets they could possess. While their exact definitions of know-how varied (usually centering on employees' tacit knowledge; accumulated, minor innovations rather than just patentable inventions; and tailoring to local conditions), the rapidly growing perception that it was invaluable led to widespread know-how licensing. As businesses embraced it, legal scholars and business lawyers during the 1950s through the 1970s scrambled to clarify legal bases for intellectual property protections for know-how. In the 1970s Supreme Court decisions undermined this effort, and a consortium of legal organizations turned instead to lobbying for statutory protection for the related, narrower category of "trade secrets." Despite the rise and relative decline of know-how in American business and law, interest in the term spread to other languages and legal systems, and the repercussions of these shifting understandings of technology transfer remain with us today.

Changes in US law and practice during the 20th century gradually gave businesses more rights to their researchers’ ideas, but controlling knowledge is no easy task.

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