Comments on: Celebrating 60 years of transistors

The modern world wouldn't be what it is if it weren't for a little piece of technology that emerged from Bell Labs in 1947.
Photos: Sixty years of transistors

[CharlesRovira]

Transistors are important but

the modern world exists because Robert Noyce, who was at Fairchild Semiconductor and Jack Kilby, who was at Texas Instruments, got rich and famous, not because of their work with components, but because they found a solution to the inter-connection problem.

(From http://oirc.blogspot.com/ OiRc-0009 Seeing Views intelligently (+ off-topic) )

[rdill]

This was both a start and a continuation

I was in high school when the transistor's invention was announced. As a kid already playing with electronics, it set my career as a participant in the amazing technology that has followed. It has been immense fun.

While we honor many who followed, the key event was the invention of the transistors, pretty much all by Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley. They accounted for all three major types of transistor from the initial point contact to the junction transistor and the field effect transistor. They also provided the basis for understanding them.

In the aftermath there were many who have changed the electronics world improving cost and performance by about 100,000,000 times. While we properly honor those who achieved a first in some aspect of the technology, in most cases that same achievement would have happened at nearly the same time anyway. Few of them came out of the blue like the original transistor and the physics behind it.

Even though we will eventually stop advancing via Moore's Law that says we will improve performance every year, there are centuries of design ahead to use these technologies for the good of mankind. We have hardly touched the things that these technologies can enable. What ideas do we have for using up to a billion transistors at a time? The future will show many that we can't even imagine today.

[Spork_This1]

Tubes

My dad worked for Westinghouse in Elmira, NY for many years designing vacuum tubes. They still get used in some audio equipment, but I won't turn away from my current tech. I sometimes wonder how I will see things in thirty years when nano-technology and quantum physics takes us to places we can't imagine today - just like the generations before us.

I can easily envision technology that looks like "magic" if we, the human race, manage to survive.

[robinaire]

Working with early transistors.

In 1951, after graduating from college, deg in Engineering/physics, I was employed by Westinghouse, and worked at their transistor development lab, before being assigned to the Atomc Pwr. Div. I worked with point contact units, and early junction units. I initially worked on trying to measure and ID charecteristics. I also worked on oscillator circuitry. One big thing was trying to get matched pairs, and if we could get 2 units within 30 or so % of each other, we had a matched pair!!
I worked on the osc. circuitry, until a red letter day when I was able to get a sustained and reasonably stable 1 meg frequency going!! I can hardly digest the difference in such things todat!! After transferring to tha Atomic power div., I had the privilege of teaching Reactor Instrumentation & Control, specializing in control rod programming, to the crew of the nautilus. Lee Robinson W. Palm Beach Fla.