Happy 60th Birthday to the Transistor
December 17, 2007 – 5:46 amDecember 16, 1947 is not a date in history that most of us celebrate, but perhaps we should. On that date, three Bell Laboratories physicists invented the transistor. The was an ugly affair made out of a paperclip and a couple of small pieces of metal, but it changed history.
Without the transistor, there would be no desktop computers, cellphones, PDAs or MP3 players. The transistor continued to shrink through the decades. Transistors shrunk to the size where many would fit on a single small integrated circuit. This lead to the invention of the microprocessor – the conputer on a single chip we are familiar with today. Modern advanced microprocessors can hold more than a billion transistors on a single chip.
All this can be traced back to three guys and a paperclip. Thanks guys!
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