Marketplace has an observation that the fundamental technological element of digital computers, the transistor, has turned 75 years old this month.
The future began 75 years ago this week with the invention of something small that's considered the most manufactured item in human history. Odds are, you are surrounded by them right now.
The transistor was born in December of 1947, in New Jersey, and it has defined the last half of the 20th century and the first quarter of the 21st. We're exploring the cultures of innovation that brought us the device that changed everything.
Take a look around the room. You'd be hard-pressed to find a gadget or gizmo within reach that does not contain a transistor. Just about everything electronic is full of them.
Via Adafruit's blog.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15, @09:27PM (2 children)
N/T
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday December 15, @09:31PM (1 child)
AI will wreck humanity, one way or another. WITH NO TYPOS.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday December 15, @10:43PM
We will self-destruct with or without AI. It's like the German toaster said, it's our nature.
compiling...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 15, @10:22PM
"Instruments of Amplification" by H. P. Friedrichs is mostly about making thermionic tubes, but has sections on "The Plumber's Point Contact Transistor" and "The Cuprous Oxide Transistor" for those who feel using ready made transistors is too easy.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Thursday December 15, @10:42PM
I guess we *did* start the fire.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 16, @12:34AM (2 children)
75 years ago it was Morning in America! Now look at us, sleeping with male prostitutes in gender neutral bathrooms.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by coolgopher on Friday December 16, @12:38AM (1 child)
There's no stopping progress! :D
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 16, @05:59AM
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday December 16, @02:16AM (2 children)
Yes, the transistor has made so much technology possible. But I regard transistors as the nuts and bolts. By themselves, they aren't enough. Also need the designs that arrange and connect transistors by the millions, to do useful work. I include in those designs the software-- the drivers, the OS, and the apps. And the I/O devices that enable human-computer communication.
The big advance of this age is computer networking.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Friday December 16, @07:48AM (1 child)
They're definitely the basic building block, but they are still encountered in very small numbers. So it is also the range of scale which is interesting. For example, some recent models of router have a piezoelectric buzzer which chirps once upon power up, that is controlled by a pair of transistors along with a capacitor and some resistors, not GPIO as one would hope. Then on the other end you have RISC-V.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday December 17, @01:30PM
That's actually a good thing: It will tell you that the power is on even if the system doesn't get far enough to execute instructions controlling some GPIO port.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Sunday December 18, @02:46PM (1 child)
If I remember correctly from an IEEE [Spectrum] article long ago (somewhere the first decade of this century), actually the large majority of the cost of the man-on-the-moon project came down to increasing the reliability of the transistors of the time: something to remember for those folks who tend to go on a rant about how SpaceX is so much more effective than NASA.
(Score: 3, Informative) by AnonTechie on Monday January 02, @06:44AM
IEEE has a series of articles on the subject:
THE TRANSISTOR AT 75
The past, present, and future of the modern world’s most important invention
https://spectrum.ieee.org/invention-of-the-transistor [ieee.org]
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Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."