Word: transistors
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...thanks to the transistor and the silicon chip, the computer has been reduced so dramatically in both bulk and price that it is accessible to millions. In 1982 a cascade of computers beeped and blipped their way into the American office, the American school, the American home. The "information revolution" that futurists have long predicted has arrived, bringing with it the promise of dramatic changes in the way people live and work, perhaps even in the way they think. America will never be the same...
Created at the University of Pennsylvania, ENIAC weighed 30 tons and contained 18,000 vacuum tubes, which failed at an average of one every seven minutes. The arrival of the transistor and the miniaturized circuit in the 1950s made it possible to reduce a room-size computer to a silicon chip the size of a pea. And prices kept dropping. In contrast to the $487,000 paid for ENIAC, a top IBM personal computer today costs about $4,000, and some discounters offer a basic Timex-Sinclair 1000 for $77.95. One computer expert illustrates the trend by estimating that...
Within a few years, the wizards at Bell Labs built the first fully transistorized (or solid-state) computer, a machine called Leprechaun. But by then Ma Bell, eager to avoid the wrath of the Justice Department's trustbusters, had sold licenses for only $25,000 to anyone who wanted to make transistors, and the scramble was on to profit from them. William Shockley, one of the transistor's three inventors, returned to his California home town, Palo Alto, to form his own company in the heart of what would become known as Silicon Valley. In Dallas, a young...
...give traveling soldiers food and drink. But the police soon regretfully closed down the kiosks: they were causing too many auto accidents. In Jerusalem, radio stations broke regular programming to play pre-1948 Zionist folk songs and stayed on the air round the clock. Residents walked the streets with transistor radios clutched to their ears. On the hour, passengers in buses and shoppers in stores fell silent, listening to the news summaries. Most of the news was good...
...terminal. The section will also draw on the talents of writers in other departments. This week's cover story, for example, was the work of Senior Writer Fred Golden, who as TIME's science editor has observed the metamorphosis of computer technology from the days of the transistor to today's microchip...