Short answers, pulled from the story.
Jack Kilby demonstrated the first working integrated circuit on the 12th of September 1958. This device relied on external gold wires to connect its components and was made from a small rectangular piece of germanium. The US Air Force became the first customer for this invention which later earned Kilby the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000.
Robert Noyce developed the first practical monolithic integrated circuit chip six months after Kilby's demonstration. Noyce's version used silicon and the planar process to create internal aluminum interconnections that allowed for mass production unlike Kilby's external wiring. This innovation enabled the Apollo Program to become the largest single consumer of integrated circuits between 1961 and 1965.
Moore's Law states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years. Gordon Moore originally stated this would happen every year before changing the claim to every two years in 1975. This trend drove the development from small-scale integration to ultra-large-scale integration and allowed microprocessor chips to pass the billion-transistor mark by 2005.
A modern semiconductor fabrication facility can cost over US$12 billion to construct. The cost rises over time due to the increased complexity of new products known as Rock's law. These facilities use wafers up to 300 mm in diameter and transistors as small as 5 nm.
The earliest integrated circuits were packaged in ceramic flat packs which continued to be used by the military for many years. Commercial packaging shifted to the dual in-line package and later adopted pin grid array and leadless chip carrier packages in the 1980s. Surface-mount technology emerged in the early 1980s and the flip-chip BGA developed in the 1990s enables much higher pin counts.
Chip art refers to surreptitious non-functional images or words embedded into the silicon surface area of integrated circuits. Designers use this practice to leave their mark on devices and turn the rigid constraints of the fabrication process into a canvas for expression. These hidden messages can be seen under a microscope and have become a cultural phenomenon from the early days of integrated circuits to the present.