![]() We make about one transistor for every ant on earth these days-every year." Gordon Moore, who quantified the effect of all those devices with his Moore's Law, estimates that every year "we make transistors amounting to a one followed by 17 zeros. Today a single advanced microprocessor can contain 1.7 billion transistors, and the transistors can be as small as 200 billionths of a meter. Thanks to the microprocessor, by the mid-1970s the idea of a personal computer, almost undreamt of a few years before, was becoming familiar, even if very few people had one yet. That opened the floodgates-more than 20 years after the birth of the transistor. It leapt another order-of-magnitude hurdle in the miniaturization and interconnecting of transistors. Then at the end of the 1960s the microprocessor, the computer on a chip, was invented. ![]() Now true miniaturization and mass production would begin to be possible. , figured out how to combine a sequence of transistors on a single wafer of silicon crystal. But it took two later breakthroughs, each a full decade apart, before the transistor could even begin its ascent to the pinnacle of its capability-so far.īetween 19 two men working independently, Jack Kilby at We think of the information revolution as having changed our world in an instant. That many vacuum tubes were produced every two days. Still, as of 1955, a total of just 4 million transistors had been manufactured. It cost $49.95, the equivalent of $380 today. That year the first transistor radio came out. By 1954 the transistor was in 97% of hearing aids and sales of the devices were up 50%. It got its first consumer application in December 1952 in a hearing aid, where it replaced one of three tubes and lowered battery costs. How could they be worth the trouble?īut the technology kept improving. ![]() Even if they could eventually, theoretically, replace the vacuum tube, the tube worked well enough. They required the design of new kinds of circuits. ![]() It just seemed like another one of those crummy jobs that required one hell of a lot of overtime and a lot of guff from my wife." Only 20% of them worked. The historian Robert Friedel quotes a Bell Labs engineer as saying, "The transistor in 1949 didn't seem like anything very revolutionary to me. It sounded like a gimmick, and just too good to be true. ![]()
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