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What do you consider to be the biggest technological advancement for electrical components?
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday December 07 2018, @09:47PM
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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