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• Re:after transistors, ICs were inevitable Re:after transistors, ICs were inevitable (Score: 2) by Nuke on Friday December 07 2018, @08:42PM (1 child)

  by Nuke (3162) on Friday December 07 2018, @08:42PM (#771297)

  Discrete transistors were cool, but they were just a small leap forward from tubes

  There is no direct physical link or line of development between tubes and transistors; but there is such between transistors and ICs.

  Before ICs, it was common to put low power cicuits, with transistors, coils, resistors and capacitors, all together in a pot and fill it with setting epoxy resin, leaving only the external connecting wires sticking out. I have old audio kit in my attic where you can see that. These were effectively integrated circuits, just rather large ones at typically a couple of cubic inches. At first "potting" was like an afterthought, done a bit amateurishly, but it did not take a genius to design components specifically to be put in a small protective envelope that we now call an IC. OTOH you could consider the inventions of the vacuum tube and of the transistor as genius.

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• Re:after transistors, ICs were inevitable (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday December 07 2018, @09:47PM

  by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday December 07 2018, @09:47PM (#771313)

  In macro-theory, tubes and transistors are both voltage controlled switches. Of course tubes require much higher voltages and have all different kinds of leakage characteristics and non-linearities compared with transistors, but... end of day, they're both VCSs.

  It's one thing to say that a microchip is just a bunch of discrete transistors, because the same basic principles and materials used control their switching, but the whole photo-lithographic process that implements a discrete transistor on an almost arbitrarily small scale on a substrate, reliably enough to have hundreds of millions of them laid out in logical circuits... that's quite an enabling leap, even if it looks obvious in hindsight.

  I worked in a factory stuffing resistors, capacitors and transistors into PCBs in 1987... being able to do that through photo-lithography instead of hand assembly is just about as revolutionary as Gutenburg's printing press as compared to manual copying. Without the photo-lithography we might have eventually developed robotic PCB stuffers, but I'd argue that the micro-chips made from photolithography were a necessary prerequisite to have practical / affordable robotic PCB stuffers. If you've seen the movie Hugo, (spoiler alert) the writing automaton was technically possible with gears and springs, but such a device is much less costly and difficult to make with micro-circuits, and much more capable of varied output.

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