60th Birthday for the Transistor
I was reminded over the weekend that Sunday was the 60th anniversary of the invention of the transistor.? I find technology advances fascinating (obviously), so I really enjoyed (really, I did!) the research for the first few chapters of The Power of Mobility, which deal with historical technology advances that changed the way we live and changed the rules of competition across industries.
If you too are into the history of technology advances, the best sources I found relating to the invention of the transistor leading up to the microprocessor and then the personal computer include:
- ?The Universal History of Computing by Georges Ifrah ? 2001 by Georges Ifrah published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. New York
- Microchip: An idea, its genesis, and the revolution it created by Jeffrey Zygmont ? 2003 by Jeffrey Zygmont published by Perseus Publishing, Cambridge MA
- Blue Magic: The People, Power and Politics Behind the IBM Personal Computer by James Chposky and Ted Leonsis ? 1988 by James Chposky and Ted Leonsis published by Facts on File Publications, New York
- They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine?by Harold Evans, Gail Buckland, and David Lefer ? 2006 published by Back Bay Books, Boston
- The Road Ahead by Bill Gates ? 1995 by William H. Gates III published by Penguin Books, New York
Meanwhile, here’s what ended up in the book about this period of history:
The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator) is often credited as the first electronic computer. It was built in 1945 at the University of Pennsylvania under the direction of J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly. The computer filled a 30-by-50 foot room, weighed 30 tons, and it took 150,000 watts of electricity to start it up. Instead of modern transisitors, the ENIAC had 18,000 vacuum tubes and could store the equivalent of about 80 bytes of data.
However, technically, the ENIAC was really only a big calculator. It could not store its own instructions. The first non-specialized computer was the EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator) built from 1947 ? 1949 at Cambridge University in England under the direction of Maurice V. Wilkes. Although the machine included many concepts that we today consider standard for computers, few would confuse it with our modern products.
No, the computer era, as we know it, had to wait for the invention of the transistor, followed by the integrated circuit, and finally the microprocessor.
While the Cambridge scientists were building the world?s first computer, scientists at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey were inventing the transistor. During December 1947 and January 1948, William Shockley, Walter Brattain, and John Bardeen made the scientific breakthroughs that would be announced in June 1948 as the junction transistor. The transistor replaced the function of the energy consuming, heat producing, and failure prone vacuum tubes in early computers with a tiny speck of semi-conductive material.
A decade later, in 1958, Jack Kilby working at Texas Instruments? and Robert Noyce working separately at Fairchild Semiconductor both figured out how to put multiple transistors and other components onto a single piece of silicon, giving birth to the Integrated Circuit and further miniaturizing the components of computers.
Another decade later, Noyce was one of the founders of Intel. Through most of 1970, Intel?s Ted Hoff worked to create an integrated circuit with all of the components for a complete computer on one slice of semiconductor.? The first Intel ?microprocessor? was delivered to Intel?s customer, Busicom in February 1971, and later that year Intel introduced its first microprocessor product, the 4004.
By 1977, Intel was selling microprocessors for $300 that Bob Noyce compared to the ENIAC in a Scientific American article: ?It is twenty-times faster, has a larger memory, is thousands of times more reliable, consumes the power of a lightbulb rather than that of a locomotive, occupies 1/30,000 the volume and costs 1/10,000 as much.?
In 1974, the 8080 became the brains behind the first personal computer product, a mail-order kit called the Altair.? This new class of computers inspired many new entrepreneurs, some of whom are still dominant players in the computer industry, including Steve Jobs who founded Apple Computer in 1976, and Bill Gates who founded Microsoft in 1975.
Apple Computer was the company that really proved the concept of a mass market personal computer. Their Apple II computer, although crude by modern standards, was approachable and usable by everyday people. The company was started literally in a garage with $1,300. The real key to Apple?s success was the availability of the VisiCalc spreadsheet software, which was initially only available on the Apple II. Thanks largely to VisiCalc, Apple?s revenues grew from $800,000 in 1977 to $48 million in 1979.