[-YYZ-]

"Late 50s -- invented by a guy named Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments. In the early 60's they already had hand-held caculators on the market."

Well, it's still sloppy to talk about "computer chips" in the late 50's, unless one considers a fairly simple IC to be a computer chip, and even those didn't really see production until the early 60's. A hand help calculator or any other device capable of somewhat sophisticated calculations in the 60's would have required quite a few ICs on a circuit board, still nothing that you could really call a computer chip. The first memory and processor chips (microprocessors appearered in the early 70's). Nice little concise history here: http://www.icknowledge.com/history/history.html

[discostu]

Not sloppy at all, if the chip was used to compute then it was a computer chip. The name comes from the first workers ever displaced by computers: guys that did nasty math for scientists and accountants... computers. Just because they weren't nearly as powerful as what we've got today doesn't mean they weren't computer chips.