Making a buck in the semiconductor industry is tougher than ever and the technical challenges appear daunting. Some would have us believe that the wheels have come off the track.

But Brian Westbury, chief economist at a Chicago-based financial firm, has a different perspective. At the recent Motorola network developers forum in Dallas, Westbury asked his listeners to think back to 1982. The Dow Jones average that year sank as low as 770, while U.S. unemployment hovered around 10 percent. Today, we know that 1982 really marked the start of the Dow's long record-breaking climb past 10,000 and that unemployment, bad as it is at 5.8 percent, is far less severe than the 1982 jobless rate.

Ronald Reagan was hated by many Europeans for basing Pershing II missiles on the Continent. Business Week declared that the American century was over and that Japan and Germany were ascendant.

"The pessimism of today is very, very similar" to the mood of the nation back in 1982. Perspective does matter, Westbury said, and to remember how strong the U.S. economy came back after 1982 is a useful reminder that today's down times won't last forever.

Of course, it is hard to know what engine will drive the economy going forward. There won't be another new product like the personal computer to propel the chip industry. That's obvious. But if a wide swath of existing applications and systems broaden their appeal, and if a few new markets take off-like digital TV, wireless LANs and speech processing-then growth will return.

"To create jobs," Westbury said, "we have to move beyond the current period of uncertainty" and get back to 5 percent annual GDP growth rates. That can happen, but of course there is no guarantee that the 20 years of growth that followed 1982 will be duplicated.

In fact, it is almost certain that the next recovery will be far different from the one that Ronald Reagan and the personal computer industry ushered in 20 years ago. Reagan was able to simply wait out Communism and let it collapse of its own corruption, something George W. Bush chose not to do in Iraq.

But the same love of freedom inherent in mankind, the vitality of new generations, will pull us forward. We truly are at the beginning of The Information Age.

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