The first transistor was successfully demonstrated at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey on this day in 1947. Bell Labs, the research arm of US telecoms giant AT&T, replaced vacuum tube triode components which were much larger, quite fragile, and required much more power to operate.
MOSFET transistors, popular today, were also invented at Bell Labs in 1959. At around the same time silicon started to take over from germanium as the key semiconductor material used.
Even before the geranium-to-silicon transition, transistors featured in computers. These now-essential electronic components first featured in a computer built at the University of Manchester in 1953. Wikipedia notes that the IBM 7070 (1958), IBM 7090 (1959), and CDC 1604 (1960) were the first computers (as products for sale) based on transistors.
The transistor inventors probably in their wildest dreams could not foretell that by 2021 consumers would be carrying pocket-sized computers (smartphones), cramming in as many as 15,300,000,000 (15.3 billion) transistors in a chip the size of a fingernail. One of the biggest chips, in terms of transistor count, available to consumers is the new Apple M1 Max (10-core, 64-bit) with 57 billion transistors.
PCs and gaming news
- Samsung Electronics delivers premium HDR gameplay with HDR10+ gaming standard support for its new screens
- Lenovo Legion Y700: 8.8in gaming tablet display specs – first official details emerge
- Adata to showcase PCIe Gen 5.0 SSDs at CES 2022 – plus lots of other cool XPG components, accessories and laptops
- The Steam Winter Sale is now on
- Steam Deck now works with 80 of Steam’s top 100 games
- LG Display will showcase a reclining curved OLED Media Chair at CES this year
- Japanese Bauhütte Launches Hand Massager for Gamers
- Former director says a Harry Potter MMO was ‘killed’ by EA
Other technology news
- RadioShack is relaunching into the crypto market, aiming at the older generation
- Samsung develops high-performance PCIe 5.0 SSD for enterprise servers
- Covid-19 cases and “no scent” Yankee Candle complaints on Amazon closely correlate
- Kaohsiung, Taiwan paved the way for a new TSMC factory campus by rezoning an idle plant owned by state-run CPC petroleum, local media reports. It will be ready for mass production in 2024
