Word: vacuumers
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...VACUUM TUBE Developed by Sir John Ambrose Fleming...
...First computer that uses vacuum tubes built by John Atanasoff...
...Forest modifies Fleming's vacuum tube to create Audion valve...
...Bell Labs, Shockley recognized early on that the solution to one of the technological nightmares of the day--the cost and unreliability of the vacuum tubes used as valves to control the flow of electrons in radios and telephone-relay systems--lay in solid-state physics. Vacuum tubes were hot, bulky, fragile and short-lived. Crystals, particularly crystals that can conduct a bit of electricity, could do the job faster, more reliably and with 1 million times less power--if only someone could get them to function as electronic valves. Shockley and his team figured out how to accomplish this...
Along the way, vital components began to shrink: the vacuum tube became the transistor; the transistor led to the microchip; the microchip married the phone and gave birth to the modem. Soon enough, sounds, photos, movies and conversations would be ground down into the smallest components of all: 1s and 0s. Was the digital revolution inevitable? In our brave new wired world, it certainly seems that...