While electronics were starting to gain importance in the 1940's, the main component that made these devices work was the vacuum tube, essentially a light bulb that can represent either a 1 or a 0 for a computer. The problem with vacuum tubes was that they tend to burn out like light bulbs, and in really complicated applications, like computers, you need hundreds or even thousands of them. When one could burn out at any time, it got really hard to maintain ever complicated and ever larger computers that needed these tubes.
In 1947, the transistor was invented. It was a much smaller, power efficient, and reliable replacement for the vacuum tube. Within only a few years, an engineer at Texas Instruments, Jack Kilby, and a future co-founder of Intel, Robert Noyce, separately came up with a way to shrink much larger electronic circuits down to wafer-thin slabs of silicon. This invention is the reason computers have become what they are today, and why we are able to have portable audio players, cell phones, digital cameras, and a number of other modern day gadgets.
No comments:
Post a Comment