Sixty years after the transistor
Yesterday was the sixtieth anniversary of the transistor. It marked the beginning of a true revolution. Electronics before the transistor used vacuum tubes. (Yes, I actually remember them.) Tubes remained the heart of electronics for a while more but their bulk and, most of all, their power requirements, meant that their fate was sealed. Soon, transistors began to replace tubes and electronics became much smaller and lighter. Even the transistor was soon superseded, however, by yet smaller and less power-hungry devices. It was the solid-state integrated circuit that really changed the world. The world of today would be inconceivable without the integrated circuit and the amazing solid-state devices that have enabled worldwide communications and interconnectivity on a scale undreamed of sixty years ago. Computer chips are now everywhere. We often hear the term, “digital revolution”, and it is the change from analog to digital devices that is behind so much of the 21st century world. All those wonderful digital devices are only possible, however, because of the incredible number of circuits that can be packed onto a silicon chip.
Here’s to those scientists at Bell Telephone Laboratories who started the technical revolution that changed the world- John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley. And here’s to the inventors of the integrated circuit- Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild Camera. More about the transistor is available at PBS.
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