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The Transistor's 60th Birthday

Posted by kdawson on from the silly-hats-will-be-worn dept.

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."

2 of 185 comments (clear)

  1. As every audiophile knows... by TeknoHog · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
  2. The Transisor's Significance by rm999 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.