The first computer was the size and weight of a house and cost a million dollars! The invention that helped to minimize it and make it accessible to everyone celebrates 67 years this month - the transistor. Revital Khalif tells the story behind the invention
Article: Revital Khalif, a young Galileo
Every time a new ICT medium ( ICT - communication + computing) is launched and its smallness and light weight are praised, two images from my childhood come to my mind. The first - listening to the radio with my dear grandfather, sitting together around the big radio receiver and waiting for it to "warm up" and start making a sound; And the second - a visit to the IBM company building with my beloved uncle, in the room that housed one of the first computers in Israel. In the seventies of the last century, the computer was seen as a collection of large metal cabinets with many light bulbs, and especially it was very cold in that room! My uncle explained to me that the computer heats up, so the ambient temperature must be kept low for it to function properly.
The first bug
What these two devices had in common was that their electronic circuits were based on a component called an empty tube. This component had two main uses - as an amplifier for electric current and as a one-way switch, which transfers current in one direction only. Vacuum tubes were placed in almost every electronic device at that time, and they played a central role in the development of electronics. Such a tube looked like an upside-down glass test tube with electrical wires and contacts inside. Its shortcomings were obvious - huge size (relative to its successors nowadays), short life span due to wear and tear, high energy consumption, and the great heat it generated.
The ICT world continued to develop, but the use of the vacuum tube was a major obstacle to acceleration. Consider that the first commercial computer weighed 13 tons - the weight of a house - and cost about a million dollars! But these were not the only shortcomings, his reliability was also not high. It is said that in 1947, computer pioneer Grace Marie Hopper was looking for the cause of a malfunction in the computer she was operating at Harvard University, and found that some kind of insect had entered the computer, burned, and caused empty tubes to melt around it. Here, according to legend, the use of the word "bug" (insect in English) was born to denote a computer malfunction.
The world's scientists invested a lot of effort, even during the Second World War, to find a replacement for the vacuum tubes. Duplicate budgets were allocated for this purpose in Britain and the Commonwealth of Independent States. The war ended before an answer was found, and research continued during the Cold War that was going on at the time between the United States and the Soviet Union and the space race. It was clear that it would not be possible to load a spaceship with such a heavy device, which heats up, which consumes so much energy, and above all is unreliable.
the perfect couple
The American Bell Laboratories, which developed advanced technologies for telecommunications companies, emerged as a leader in the field. Back in the years of World War II, Bell Laboratories made progress in the development of components based on specially processed semi-conductive materials. The road to the idea of using these materials as a replacement for tubes was not far away. However, it was necessary to advance the physical theory of the solid state to understand the properties of these materials.
The team established at Bell Laboratories to develop the applications of solid state physics included William Shockley, Walter Brattain and John Bardin. In 1972, the three researchers won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their invention, but the road there was accompanied by quite a few harsh voices, envy and competition.
It started in 1945, when Shukley was put in charge of a small research group at Bell Laboratories. His team included Bardin, who he had already worked with before the war, and Berthain. The group began working on the realization of Shockley's idea: developing an amplifier based on a semiconductor.
Berdin and Berthain were a perfect couple: Berdin was a theoretical physicist, and Berthain a practical physicist; Bardin would come up with new ideas and propose experiments to test them, and the talented Bartain knew how to build the models in the laboratory and carry out the experiments. The two worked closely, and Shukley managed things from a distance and was hardly involved in the practical aspects of the research.
Back in the middle of 1945, Shukley proposed the device known today as a "field output transistor", but the technology of those days did not allow its construction. In the first two years, progress was slow and frustrating. Accidentally touching the component would cause the amplifier to work, and any other movement would cause it to stop. In one of the cases, the amplifier did not work at all, but started to work precisely when it was immersed in water.
In November 1947, a revolutionary idea came to Bardin's mind - a new method for manufacturing the amplifier. This is where Berthain's practical skills came to the fore. He took razor blades, a small wooden triangle and a paper clip, and built a prototype amplifier on the lab table. A month later, on December 16, 1947, Berthain and Berdin operated their amplifier for the first time: they connected a microphone to its control signal input, and heard their voices well amplified in a speaker connected to the amplifier's output.
Berdin and Bertain did not inform Shukley of the change, and he was sure that they were still trying to develop an amplifier based on his field effect. The first time he heard about it was only after their transistor was already working. On the one hand he was happy to hear about the breakthrough, and on the other hand he was angry that the two did not tell him about their actions. He felt cheated, as if Berdin and Berthain had robbed him of the glory of inventing the transistor.
The device was first introduced on December 23, 1947. It was a rather complicated and cumbersome device called a point contact transistor - a current amplifier made of the semi-conducting element germanium.
Victory celebrations
Bell Laboratories celebrated its success. For the first time, it was possible to reliably and precisely control the magnitude of the electric current inside a tiny semiconductor component, which consumed tiny amounts of energy. This was the breakthrough everyone was looking for and the beginning of the end of the big, bulky vacuum tubes. The company issued press releases, and photographers were invited to document Berdin, Berthain, and Shukli leaning over the laboratory equipment in "Victory Photography".
Bell Laboratories licensed the production of the transistor to other companies, and in a short time the first commercial transistors appeared on the market. Thus, in the sixties of the twentieth century, transistor was also the common name for transistor radio - a portable radio receiver, which used transistors (instead of empty tubes) as the active electronic components. Previously it was not possible to produce portable radio receivers at all.
Today, electronics use "integrated circuits" - tiny components that are manufactured using unique methods on semiconductor materials, and which contain millions of transistors. These components enable the miniaturization of the world of computing and communication.
What next? Many researchers in the world are looking for other solutions, outside the world of semiconductors, for example from the field of molecular biology - electrical conductors made of molecules. The name of the game is still the same today - as small as possible, reliable, accurate and consumes less energy.
Did you know?
What is a semiconductor? You must be familiar with materials that conduct electricity, and insulating materials that do not conduct electricity. A semi-conductor is a material whose electrical conductivity is in the range between conductive materials and insulating materials and which changes its conduction property according to external conditions applied to it - electric voltage, light, heat and more.
Did you know?
Why is the transistor called by this name? The word "transistor" is composed of the words "transition" (Transition - changes) and "Resistor" (Resistor - resistance), meaning a component with variable electrical resistance.
> The writer is the owner of Informational - from information to knowledge
* The article was published in the December 2014 issue of Young Galileo
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5 תגובות
At the time, Grace Hopper was working on the Mark 2 computer, which was actually built with relays, not tubes. She even attached the poor flapper to the computer's log, noting the faulty relay.
The term "bug", in the sense of a malfunction, is already attributed to Edison.
The word "bug" is very old in English, and was synonymous with harmful insects. It is very likely that "full of bugs" referred to lettuce...
Thank you very much for the enlightening and instructive comments.
The computer you saw at IBM in the seventies was transistorized. IBM's transistor computers came out in about 1960. In 1964, the IBM360 was released, which was very common and was used for many years.
There were portable radios even before the transistor era. Those based on subminiature vacuum tubes were even the size of a transistor radio, although battery operation was expensive.
Very nice.
Very interesting article, thank you