Word: transistors
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Last week Bell Telephone Laboratories demonstrated a small, simple device that can do many of the jobs now done by vacuum tubes. Called a "Transistor," it is a slim metal cylinder about an inch long. Inside are two hair-thin wires whose points press, two-thousandths of an inch apart, on a pinhead of germanium...
MITI has sometimes put its money on the wrong horses. During the early 1950s, when a young company that was later to become known as Sony was getting excited about a new invention from the U.S. called the transistor, MITI chose to help two other firms engaged in making soon-to-be-obsolete vacuum tubes. MITI also had no say in Sony's decisions to market Betamax videocassette recorders and Walkman portable stereos, two of the company's fastest-selling products. Japan is the leading manufacturer of industrial robots, but MITI played no role in financing their development...
...first computer books, like Adam Osborne's 1975 classic, Introduction to Microcomputers (Osborne/McGraw-Hill; $12.50), were aimed at computer hobbyists, explaining the inner workings of the hardware down to the smallest transistor. These were quickly followed by books of software programs, like the popular BASIC Computer Games (Workman; $7.95), which provide page after page of prewritten computer codes that the reader can copy and run on his own machine. Now, as the domain of computer buyers expands, the bestsellers tend to be either step-by-step guides for new users, usually geared to specific machines, or introductory texts like McWilliams...
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...