The quarter-century from 1950 to 1975 witnessed the introduction of an extraordinary sequence of revolutionary semiconductor products: the silicon transistor, the integrated circuit (IC), the semiconductor memory, and the microprocessor. This ever-increasing complexity was made possible by many small breakthroughs in manufacturing technology involving new fabrication processes and measurement methods. Often an innovation involving vacuum technology appeared at just the right time to make possible the next technological leap. The metallization process is a good example. The components in the first practical IC were interconnected with a patterned layer of vacuum-evaporated aluminum. When the MOS field-effect transistor was perfected, it required a sodium-free evaporation process and the magnetically-focused electron-beam evaporation source propitiously arrived to save the day. As metal connections got narrower, strange failures began to occur. The scanning electron microscope (operating under vacuum, of course) was a new tool that let us examine the surface of an IC as if we were standing on its surface and gazing around. The failures were seen to be caused by microcracks in the metal lines as they crossed over steps in the circuit topography. Geometrical analysis showed that gaps were caused by shadowing during vacuum deposition. Methods were devised increase the mobility of the depositing aluminum atoms so that they would fill in the gaps during film growth. Metallization failures due to electromigration, and the shorting of shallow junctions by silicon diffusion into the aluminum, had to be cured by adding small amounts of copper and silicon to the aluminum. New magnetron sputter sources came to the rescue. During these years, ion implantation, plasma etching, and low-pressure and plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition, all became manufacturing processes, and, without which, today's (and tomorrow's) ICs would not be possible