The Transistor's 60th Birthday

Apple Acolyte sends in a Forbes piece noting the 60th birthday of the transistor on Dec, 16. For the occasion the AP provides the obligatory Moore's-Law-is-ending, no-it-isn't article. From Forbes: "Sixty years ago, on Dec. 16, 1947, three physicists at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., built the world's first transistor. William Shockley, John Bardeen and William Brattain had been looking for a semiconductor amplifier to take the place of the vacuum tubes that made radios and other electronics so impossibly bulky, hot and power hungry."

not entirely

[User 956]

the AP provides the obligatory Moore's-Law-is-ending, no-it-isn't article.

Not really-- if you're AMD, Moore's Law and Murphy's Law are kind of becoming the same thing [infoworld.com].

The Transisor's Significance

[rm999]

It's a little hard to put the importance of the transistor into perspective. One way of looking at it is about 3 billion transistors are made worldwide - a second. Imagine how different the world would be if these transistors were still made manually with vacuum tubes (or not made at all.)

While you read this post, about 20 transistors were manufactured for every person in the world.

Re:As every camper knows...

[mangu]

A nice, warm sleeping bag in a tent that you carried in your backpack is better than any hotel room.

There's a taste for everything, but there's no denying that transistors make sound that's closer to the original, same as a hotel room is closer to the room where you (OK, most people...) sleep at home.

Actually, one of the tube amplifiers biggest shortcomings, its high distortion, is one of the reasons why tubes are still used for a niche application: guitar amplifiers. The distortion caused by the tubes has been incorporated in the sound people expect of guitars, I suppose that's what you mean by "warm-sounding".

Re:The hell?

[dhavleak]

Anybody who has held a soldering iron and done something digital with single transistors please raise your hand ? Vacuum tubes ? Relays ?

One hand raised way up here.

Fanciest thing I ever did was a capacitance measuring device. Mostly used op-amps though IIRC there was a single discrete BJT in it as well. It was a really wierd device in the end though. You had to connect the leads of the capacitor and press a start button for the device to start measuring it. The idea was to use a constant current source to charge the capacitor up to a set voltage. So with voltage and charging current being constant, the capacitance value was proportional to time. That's where the transistor came in -- pressing start turned the transistor on, to send a reset pulse to a timer, and also discharged the capacitor. And then getting an accurate reading (relatively speaking) was a question of calibrating the current, voltage, and timer frequency accordingly. A super-fun project, though not very useful in the end :P

Re:Good 'ole days

[DrLudicrous]

I would say this- the transistor led to virtually all modern electronics. In fact, it is the basis of our modern life and economy. Without it, we could not possibly be where we are today. While tubes may indeed have been the size of the original transistor in 1947/1948, there is no way it could have miniaturized at the rate transistors have- in fact, there is most likely a hard limit to the smallest tube size. Finally, the transistors importance over tubes was that it acted as a miniaturized amplifier. Its true value lay in its ability to facilitate digital (Boolean) logic, which led us to develop computers. The transistor is the single-most important invention of the human race in the last 100 years, and perhaps even the last 200 (though good arguments could be made for penicillin/antibiotics).

Re:The hell?

[Blkdeath]

Maybe no one wants to honour a notorious racist like William Shockley

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley#Beliefs_about_populations_and_genetics [wikipedia.org]

It's sad that when someone applies scientific principles to a politically charged situation they're framed as a bigot.

It is true that unskilled, poor, unintelligent people have more children. They simply have more time on their hands and less grasp of the consequences children will have on their lifestyle and they tend to have less access (voluntarily or financially) to proper modern birth control methods and hey, when you've got a lot of time on your hand sex is a great passtime!

Shockley did conclude through his research that this happens more with black families than with whites, however he proposed that all people with sub-100 IQs (no further qualification) should be paid for voluntary sterilization.

His ideas while radical at the time have been tossed around for decades. It is widely held that uneducated, unskilled people who do either no or menial labour greatly increase the chances that their children will do much of the same later in life. It's why ghetto-style atmospheres tend to be cyclical and highly self-supporting. It's also why people who "escape" from that life are notable exceptions.

The man was a scientist and one who contributed one of the most pivotal pieces of our way of life to date. That's not something that should be undermined by a piece of socio-politically charged research that he did besides.

Then again there's almost always two sides to every major scientific discovery. Einstein gave us atomic energy but he also gave us atomic weapons (for which I understand he was forever mournful). Shockley gave us something that revolutionized the way we live, work and play but he also inadvertently gave us spam and script kiddies and phishing and 419 scams and and and ... :P

Re:Good 'ole days

[KenSeymour]

Indeed. I didn't realize until about 5 years ago that relays are still used in safety-rated applications such as train control and power control logic.

These "vital relays" are made today by Union Switch and Signal [switch.com]
and Alstom [alstomsign...utions.com].

Certain applications, which by law must use safety-rated components, include relays.

Re:The hell?

[Alioth]

Actually, it's not that uncommon to use the odd single transistor. Look at any commercial PCB (such as your graphics card, or PCB motherboard), and you'll spot quite a number of SOT-23 packaged transistors.

Almost all of my digital electronics projects include at least one discrete transistor. Quite often, you need an open collector/open drain output from a chip, but it doesn't actually provide one - a single mosfet will do the job (maybe two if you need it to not be inverted). Very often you need to switch some power. A single power mosfet does the job here - very high input impedance, can switch tens of amps. Need to buffer a high impedance output? A single transistor common collector amplifier will often do the job just fine. Need a level shifter for a couple of outputs from 3.3v to 5v? One mosfet and one resistor will usually do the job just fine. Need a single gate inverter, and don't have the space for a 74HC04? One P-channel and one N-channel mosfet, in SOT-23 packages is nice and compact without being too hard to solder. (Although you can get a 74HC1G04 with just one gate, but most people don't have them knocking around in the parts box, but will have a couple of P and N channel mosfets they can use).

The humble discrete transistor is still used all over the place and isn't going away any time soon.

It should be a rite of passage for any computer geek to learn how to create a few CMOS gates with discrete mosfets. Even if they don't intend to do a lot with electronics, it does give an appreciation of what's going on in the real world.

Re:The hell?

[v1]

Radio Shack used to sell 150-in-1 and 200-in-one sets. They were 20"x 12" wood or plastic boxes with groups of parts on the top board, including transistors, resistors, capacitors, and a variety of other parts. The parts were mounted to the colorful top, labeled and grouped. Their connectors ran to numbered springs beside them. You'd use the included wire to run between parts, by bending springs to the side, inserting the stripped end of the wire, and releasing it.

They came with booklets that had 150 (or 200) different projects to make. They'd start you out slow, showing you a picture of the kit with the wires in place, and a set of number lists like 18-22-85-10 33-28-21 etc to rum the wires. Later in the book they replaced the picture of the kit with a schematic of the project.

Some of the latter projects were quite complex, and many of them used some nifty components such as a earphone for a microphone, and a CDS sensor to make a light beam tripped noise maker. It's too bad you can't find anything like that nowadays. I've seen kits today that use plastic encased pieces assembled on pegboards, but I can just imagine how difficult it would be to play with the design by adjusting parts. I suppose nowadays people would let their young kids play with sets such as mine alone, and they'd swollow the wires or something and blame+sue radio shack for $20 million. Sad.

Those sets got me into electroncis when I was 8. The knowlege I had of electronics in gradeschool drarfed teachers I ran into on the subject in high school. Now people have to wait until college to get the education I got before age 10. *sigh*