Brattain and John Bardeen, experimentalist and theorist respectively, demonstrated a crude, but working, amplifying transistor made from germanium and wires. It would take over two years, but on December 23, 1947, the first transistor was demonstrated at Bell Telephone Laboratories. 59 Three months later, Bell Labs issued an “Authorization for Work” to investigate making transistors from solid-state materials. 58 The war time scientific culture also encouraged communication and cooperation among all researchers – an example was a “Meeting on Germanium Crystals” held at Bell Labs on Apamong university and industrial laboratory scientists. During World War II, the government significantly increased funding of semiconductor research at Bell Labs, universities and industrial companies, and created MIT Radiation Laboratory to coordinate the research. Once again the government played a major role in pushing theory into practice. 57īut investigators lacked pure enough materials to create semiconductors. And profoundly different than a vacuum tube, a transistor worked not by electrons flowing through voltage gradient, but by channeling them in semiconductor materials. Amplification had two purposes: to let a very small current control a very large one, and to boost signals to overcome circuit noise so signals with information could be detected. Switching on-off made possible the conversion of an analog signal, electricity, to the 0’s and 1’s of a digital signal. Driving and funding the search for an alternative was the military.Ī transistor is a device that accomplishes the two necessary tasks of switching on-offand amplification. 56 Everyone knew an alternative had to be found to vacuum tubes if computers were to be made more reliable, faster, smaller, and consume less power and generate less heat. The transistor was the first of three technological discontinuities to radically alter the dynamics and structure of the computer market-structure.
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