Submission + - The Transistor's Birthday
Apple Acolyte writes: Tomorrow the transistor turns 60 years old:
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.
In a related story, the AP looks at the prospect of processor technology nearing the end of potential gains from fab shrinks, indicating that the transistor is showing its age and may need to be replaced in order for the industry to keep pace with Moore's Law.
