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The Transistor's 60th Birthday
Apple Acolyte sends in a Forbes piece noting the 60th birthday of the transistor on Dec, 16. For the occasion the AP provides the obligatory Moore's-Law-is-ending, no-it-isn't article. From Forbes: "Sixty years ago, on Dec. 16, 1947, three physicists at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., built the world's first transistor. William Shockley, John Bardeen and William Brattain had been looking for a semiconductor amplifier to take the place of the vacuum tubes that made radios and other electronics so impossibly bulky, hot and power hungry."
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Either no one cares about the poor transistor, or you've all gotten lives.
a nice, warm-sounding amplifier is not something made of transistors. It's a series of tubes.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
the AP provides the obligatory Moore's-Law-is-ending, no-it-isn't article.
Not really-- if you're AMD, Moore's Law and Murphy's Law are kind of becoming the same thing.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
The field effect transistor, the device that is relevant today, was invented and patented in 1926 by
Julius Edgar Lilienfeld. Due to his patents many claims by Bell Labs were thrown out.
The device that was invented by Bell Labs in 1947 was a point contact transistor. An inherently fragile device not fit for mass production. The same device was invented in parallel in France by two german Scientists: Welker and Matere see here.
Schockley himself did however invent the bipolar junction transistor a couple of years later. This invention was truly a streak of genius as it is the most complex of all devices.
So, thanks to american corporate giants history was rewritten again.
It's a little hard to put the importance of the transistor into perspective. One way of looking at it is about 3 billion transistors are made worldwide - a second. Imagine how different the world would be if these transistors were still made manually with vacuum tubes (or not made at all.)
While you read this post, about 20 transistors were manufactured for every person in the world.
might I recommend this book by Bo Lojek. Its a great history of how it all happened with a lot of technical detail. English is not Bo's first language but that is not an issue as its the technical detail and the science that carries this book.
Headline from February 7, 2496:
Nearly 5 centuries after it was predicted, Moore's Law has finally come to an end. Having nothing to report, Slashdot's servers collapsed in a puff of 2048-qubit floating point reals.
... more on that later. But first, President Bush CXXIII was seen picking his nose in public...
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There's a taste for everything, but there's no denying that transistors make sound that's closer to the original, same as a hotel room is closer to the room where you (OK, most people...) sleep at home.
Actually, one of the tube amplifiers biggest shortcomings, its high distortion, is one of the reasons why tubes are still used for a niche application: guitar amplifiers. The distortion caused by the tubes has been incorporated in the sound people expect of guitars, I suppose that's what you mean by "warm-sounding".
Bipolar?
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
What about the calculator replacing the slide rule? Or sci-fi uber quality holographic pictures.
In either case, here at Microsoft, we feel standards are important. And we have fun, too. Doug Mahugh, Microsoft
Beowulf cluster of those!
... the Internet would be just an array of tubes.
"Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these!"
You've just professed belief in something verging on a Randi challenge in a Slashdot discussion.
Would you like an oxygen-free, 99.999% pure woven copper blindfold and gold-plated cigarette?
I strongly disagree that the invention of the transistor 'led to all electronics', no offense to your grandad.
The transistor is part of electronics, and electronics was quite well developed by the time the transistor came along. There were already steps towards miniturization using vacuum tubes as small as 3/8" across and only about 3/4" high, which was not that much larger than the first transistors. There were plenty of tubes that carried more than one circuit within the glass enclosure, so in effect they would already be 'integrated circuits' of sorts.
The transistors main contribution was the fact that it was 'solid state', no glow current needed (so much less power consumption, which in turn allowed much further miniaturization) and the fact that they could directly switch current at voltages that could drive devices directly instead of through large bulky transformers. All the rest (thin film, the fet and so on) followed from there but are also just 'chapters' in the book of electronics.
The basics are:
- electromechanics (wiring, switches, relays)
- passive components (resistors, capacitors, coils, diodes, etc)
- active components (transistors, tubes, various variations on the transistor)
- integrated circuits (which is a subbranch of active components)
Relays, interestingly are also 'active' components in a sense.
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You can't fool me! You're just PRETENDING to be a conspiracy theorist!
All the conspiracy theorists on the Web are really GOVERNMENT AGENTS! You're all just PRETENDING to be conspiracy theorists, to distract us so we don't notice your GREAT CONSPIRACY!
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
At UTC 13:16 on Sunday 16 December you write about an event on 16 December 1947... Coincidence?
You write this in 2007 and mention a UFO incident on 7/7 1947... Coincidence?
2 posts about this subject appear on this page, one enumerating 2 points and the other mentioning 2 dates, and these posts appear 22 minutes apart... Coincidence?
I think not. Clearly this can't be coincidence. Clearly you're an alien pretending to be a conspiracy theorist.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
A nice, warm sleeping bag in a tent that you carried in your backpack is better than any hotel room.
Right up until the next morning when you wish you had a hot shower and room service.
In the world of vacuum tube failure modes, filament burnout isn't very high on the list. One exception is series-string filament setups (most TVs, some radios) where production variances in heaters inevitably cause one or more tubes to experience an excessive voltage drop. Excessive voltage can considerably shorten heater life. Problem is, like series-string Christmas lights - when one heater burns out, the whole string (often every tube in the chassis except for the rectifier) goes dark. Interestingly enough, insufficient heater voltage can also cause a tube to fail, through a process known as cathode stripping
More commonly, tubes fail for other reasons including depletion of the cathode (loss of emission), contamination of the grid(s) (with material from the cathode), gas contamination (offgassing of internal elements, seal failure), shorts between internal elements or fracture of the envelope.
So, just because the light is on, doesn't mean anyone is home
There's a Starman, waiting in the sky / He'd like to come and meet us, but he hasn't got the time.
The transistors main contribution was the fact that it was 'solid state'
I would argue that one of the main contributions of the transistor was that they are not expected to wear out during normal usage. Tubes are not reliable enough to build complicated circuits (e.g. computers) for the mass market out of. Think "one tube failing every two days" like ENIAC, except repeated across millions of desktop PCs.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
I would say this- the transistor led to virtually all modern electronics. In fact, it is the basis of our modern life and economy. Without it, we could not possibly be where we are today. While tubes may indeed have been the size of the original transistor in 1947/1948, there is no way it could have miniaturized at the rate transistors have- in fact, there is most likely a hard limit to the smallest tube size. Finally, the transistors importance over tubes was that it acted as a miniaturized amplifier. Its true value lay in its ability to facilitate digital (Boolean) logic, which led us to develop computers. The transistor is the single-most important invention of the human race in the last 100 years, and perhaps even the last 200 (though good arguments could be made for penicillin/antibiotics).
"Imagine a Beowulf movie made using these!"
Because they prefer the distortion induced which sound to them more "warm" "sweet" or whatever adjective they want to qualify it, in comparison to digital processing, which has different set of distortion. But in the very end, whether one is better than the other for an everyday use (aka : not 1kw amplification) is a question of what attribute you are looking at. And as far as I know, for convenience/portability and quality of sound reproduction in comparison to the original nothing beat digital (and that is not even counting the new vinyl which are saved from a digitally processed signal to start with...).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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Lilienfeld never made an actual device. In EE and applied physics you don't get credit for inventing something if you were never actually able to make it. Moreover, the reason Lilienfeld wasn't able to make one was because he didn't know the underlying physics. He couldn't have: quantum mechanics wouldn't even be around for a couple of years. So, here we have someone who never made a device and didn't really even understand what was going on theoretically. Oh yeah, and he filed a patent, but never published otherwise. I'd say that he deserves a footnote, but nothing more.
And yeah, I feel a little sympathy for Mataré and Welker. However, the sad fact is that they made their transistor a full two months after Bell Labs. Regardless of whether it was done independently of Bardeen, Shockley, and Brittain, they were second. I'd say that history got it right.
I'm old enough to remember the "glow" of the old tube devices. I worked in a television repair shop in the 70's and remember working on these beasts. Many a finger was singed replacing some of these suckers. Many times I would have a old 6U10 tube fail, causing the 6LQ6 output tube to run away and actually glow cherry red hot! An awesome site to watch, but then the pain of waiting for it to cool down enough to pull out and replace. I miss the days of soldering tube connections back together, removing dead mice or other critters who crawl inside those boxes to keep warm in the winter, then get zapped on the high voltage transformers. Ahhhhh.....the good old days ;)
the 'wear' that tubes are subject to is twofold, first minute bits of air enter the glass enclosure over time and second (helped by the first) the glowing spiral that produces the electrons that carry the current in a tube wears out just like any other lightbulb (of which the vacuumtube is really just a special purpose cousin).
:)
And yes, the lack of wear is a significant plus for the transistor, in fact a point could probably be made for the development of redundancy and 'hot swap' (tubes run hot to the touch) at a much earlier stage. Not to mention the power bill you'd receive if your average PC was tube powered. You'd likely have to live right next door to a power plant too
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I have a 45 year old amp on a shelf with distortion figures bettering any scientifically proven metric for audibility at normal listening levels. The distortion argument became invalid with the introduction of the Williamson circuit (a very long time ago.)
Googling the phrase "vacuum microelectronics" is quite informative. Or just look at a plasma screen TV, which is actually an array of tiny gas switching tubes. A good introduction to the field is here:
http://bwrc.eecs.berkeley.edu/People/Grad_Students/botis/documents/papers/243_botis.pdf
When tubes get that small, one no longer needs high voltages and heated cathodes to achieve electron emission. The electrostatic field and a tiny emitter point will work just fine. If solid state never came around, who knows what kind of tube-based electronics might have been developed.
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Indeed. I didn't realize until about 5 years ago that relays are still used in safety-rated applications such as train control and power control logic.
These "vital relays" are made today by Union Switch and Signal
and Alstom.
Certain applications, which by law must use safety-rated components, include relays.
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
You're an anonymous coward *and* an idiot, now that's an interesting combination.
Vacuum tubes contain a tungsten filament that is heated up using a (typically) 6.3 V power source totally independent of the rest of the circuit.
This current causes the filament to heat up to roughly orange in the visual spectrum and it will have a cloud of electrons boiling around it. This is also known as a 'hot' Cathode, in that it produces the desired effect by heating up a piece of metal. The byproduct of this process is a lot of infrared radiation, a good part of which gets absorbed by the glass enclosure of the tube, which tends to get too hot to handle in most operating conditions.
The grid controls the flow of the electrons between the cathode and the anode (usually a plate around the assembly or somewhere near the top), you can have multiple grids (like a transistor with multiple bases, but the interaction would be slightly different) if you want but since this article is about the transistor we can pretend that tubes only have one 'grid'. The reason it is a grid (and not a plate) is because the electrons actually need to pass *through* the grid, on their way from the Cathode to the Anode. How many of them will get there depends on the voltage present on the grid input terminal of the tube.
Hot Swap was an apparently misguided attempt at humour, I apologise for the fact that it went over your head. To insult you no further I will not attempt to explain the joke.
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In fact, it is a spiral, just like the 'loop' in most lightbulbs that you can see is a spiral. The simple reason for that is that there isn't room enough in a small triode to pack in the wire as a continuous segment at the voltage that the filaments run at the currents are high enough that you need an appreciable length of wire to get to the required resistance.
Just for you I've dug you up a picture of what an early model heater would have looked like:
http://www.thevalvepage.com/valvetek/heater/fig4.gif
and a few more recent types:
http://www.thevalvepage.com/valvetek/heater/fig5.gif
The two types of tubes that are still in common use either use the tungsten filament as described above (typically for higher power applications) or an indirect system where the heating filament is 'wrapped' by a small tube coated with some oxide, in this case the electron emission is secondary.
Slasdot was labelled 'news for nerds', last I checked, and your remark about the 'hot cathode' being
in contrast to there being no filament at all does not contradict anything I said before.
Also, it's hard to tell one anoymous coward from another.
Have a really nice day.
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Tubes are not reliable enough to build complicated circuits (e.g. computers) for the mass market out of. Think "one tube failing every two days" like ENIAC, except repeated across millions of desktop PCs.
We instead emulate the failure rate in software known as Windows [ducks head]
Table-ized A.I.
Transistors are really amazing devices. Imagine how big an iPod Nano would be if you had to make it using vacuum tubes! I guess you'd need a whole power plant just to keep it alive! And it wouldn't even work, because the tubes are too slow.
-- Cheers!
> Sweet Jesus your ignorance is astounding. The reason lightbulb filaments are wound in a spiral (actually a spiral of spiral wire) is to trap heat; it has to operate near boiling to emit visible light. It has nothing to do with emitting electrons.
:)
Trap the heat ??? that must be one of those things that we are not going to agree on, no matter how you produce a given amount of power in a given amount of space you'll not be 'trapping' any of it, the object (vacuum tube cathode, electric blanket, whatever floats your boat) will simply go up in temperature until it is emitting as much heat as you are pumping in to it in the form of electrical power.
The spiral is simply a way to fit a long piece of wire into a smaller space so that it can reach the required temperature, if it could be done with a short and thick piece of wire then they would have done that instead but they can't because the wire would not have the correct resistance in that shape. That's very simple, elementary 'ohms' law level stuff, I'm sure even you can get it: short & thick: low resistance -> very little power will be transformed into heat (which is the main function of a heater), therefore we use a longer wire and we wind it up into a spiral, same physical size as the thick piece but more resistance.
As for those being the 'exception', then just about all the tubes I've looked at where the exception... unlucky me...
What is heat if it is not the primary emission of the *heater* filament in your book then ?
It's easy: primary emission: infrared radiation, aka heat, secondary emission: electrons...
The grid, photomultiplier tubes and loads of other things that have nothing to do with the price of tea in China do not come in to it. I don't even care if you even have a grid in there, we could be talking about a diode.
I agree with you that if the grid starts emitting electrodes that things are out of whack though, it's not supposed to do that
If you are shaking while posting *anonymously* on a forum somewhere I suggest you check your medication levels, maybe you missed a day or two ? Or do you feel threatened in some way ? Or is it that you think lobbing insults anonymously does not afford you enough protection already ?
Also, there is an excellent article that I've found while trying to corroborate your statement about the filament being wound doubly, unfortunately that wasn't in there but it makes for interesting reading anyway.
http://www.john-a-harper.com/tubes201/
and with that I'm off to bed, if you wish to continue the conversation I suggest you log in.
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Quoting Gordon Moore as "Every year we make on the order of 1,017 transistors. That's a one followed by 17 zeros."
Is anybody proofreading at Forbes.com?
thegodmovie.com - watch it
In the old AA5 All american five radio's there was a #47 6 volt lamp used to illuminate the dial in parallel with 1/2 of the filament of the rectifier... usually a 35Z5. Also the DC voltage (B+)ran through this lamp too If the lamp burns out then that upsets the voltage distribution and will burn out the rectifier tube.
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
While this may be true, how many other racist Nobel laureates of that era can you name? How many left such a bad aftertaste in the mouth of history? Maybe a lot of them held those beliefs in private, but Shockley became more famous for his racism than for his Nobel. He was almost like the Barry Bonds of Nobel Prizewinners- he didn't just win a Nobel, he proceeded to tack a big fat asterisk on it. At least Barry needed his asterisk injected in his butt to get his baseball in the first place. Shockley didn't even have that excuse.
Having won a Nobel Prize myself as far as you know, let me tell you how this works.
You will be amazed at how these things change your life- I highly recommend picking one up. Usually it means you're set for life. You get automatic Respect with a capital "R" wherever you go. You're invited to all the banquets and dinners, people want to be photographed standing next to you, anything associated with you gets lavishly funded, and you can pocket a few grand a night by reading crap speeches at podiums. You get your picture taken at Google headquarters (if you have time), and then Larry and Sergey will brag about meeting YOU- not the other way around. As John Cockcroft put it (Physics, 51), "When I look round this great hall I feel that I have been transported into a magical world by the genie of Alfred Nobel." And it really feels like that. Of course, the euphoria never lasts, but whether the Respect remains is up to you. It turns out that winning a Nobel Prize comes with its own list of DOs and DON'Ts.
Or when you wake up in two feet of snow.
hello again, mr. Anonymous.
/.
/. has lots of people that already know how vacuum tubes work, but there are also plenty of folks that haven't got a clue what a vacuum tube even is. For those that already know I really doubt I could teach them anything worth knowing (yourself ?), for the rest, people that can't remember a time before the CD and the chip a device made of glass and bits of wire that you could build a computer out of must be a pretty weird idea.
> Please I urge you, you seem smart but are mysteriously stuck with many misconceptions.
So from being an idiot I now 'seem smart' ? I guess that's an improvement. Who knows where it will lead...
> Perhaps you are self-taught. Commendable, but it's never OK to just assume what you know is gospel truth; investigate and keep learning, always be ready to discard notions proven wrong.
Let me urge you a bit in return: (and btw thanks for the electron micrographs of the lightbulb, that was really nice and interesting stuff.)
Lighten up a bit.
If you really want to teach someone (anyone) then you should try not to come off as a total asshole, snipe attacks, dragging in everything but the kitchen sink to prove yourself, getting yourself worked up into a raging frenzy (by your own admission).
That's not how I remember any of the people that ever taught me.
Especially not whilst being anonymous at the same time, that's simply not nice. Most people don't even bother to read at the level where they can see your writings, they didn't call the 'guest' account 'anonymous coward' for nothing here. I'm out here with my name in full public view, 3 seconds of googling and you know who I am and what I do for a living (and after reading this how I got there) and if you're clever where I live and what my home phone # is.
You're hiding behind a screen of anonymity and sniping at me by poking holes in something that was kept fairly simple on purpose to demonstrate your 'superiority'. But my initial writing was perfectly sufficient given the situation. In other words, you may know more but you are not very tactful, instead of expanding on what I wrote and recognizing that what I wrote was a simplified view of how things work in a tube, if you feel that there is a need for that (but not the be-all-end-all 100% optimized for production situation in a tube) and if you felt so inclined you could have simply expanded on it without making it personal.
This is not the annual ARRL get together, this is
Making things personal whilst being an AC is not a mode of discussion that will make you my friend any time soon.
That sort of attitude tends to impede the flow of information. You come across as a *very* frustrated old guy, that thinks he's due some respect because of his age and knowledge that landed here by accident, and the more you refer to your books from 1962 and your vintage TEK (guess what, I have one too, well maybe not that much of a vintage one, a really neat dual trace, it even had a calibration certificate when I got it but it is most certainly out of 'spec' by now, it was moved several times internationally, but I did give one of the not very portable modular ones to my kid to take apart (it was gone beyond salvage, unfortunately, too many bits were missing)) the more you confirm that image.
By analogy, if I explain to my son how a car engine works, you would come and stand next to me to tell me in a loud and belligerent voice how I know nothing about car engines because I left out the oil pump and am showing my ignorance.
No need to complicate that vision by adding in all the bits and pieces that make it manufacturable at a low price or hyper efficient. We didn't address the silver on the legs either did we ? (I'm sure you will now launch in a tirade of how ignorant I am and that it's not really silver if you still don't get my point).
When explaining a transistor to someone you also would not right away start with vacuum deposition techniq
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My goodness! I'll have to upgrade to a better tinfoil hat.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.