Transistors and Integrated Circuits

the second and third generation of computers

transistors

a transistor is a semiconductor device commonly used to amplify or switch electronic signals.

The first patent for the field – effect transistor principle was filed in Canada by Austrian – Hungarian physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld on 22 October 1925, but Lilienfeld did not publish any research articles about his devices. In 1934 German physicist Dr. Oskar Heil patented another field – effect transistor.

On 17 November 1947 John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, at AT&T Bell Labs, observed that when electrical contacts were applied to a crystal of germanium, the output power was larger than the input.

William Shockley saw the potential in this and worked over the next few months greatly expanding the knowledge of semiconductors and could be described as the father of the transistor. The term was coined by John R. Pierce. According to physicist/historian Robert Arns, legal papers from the Bell Labs patent show that William Shockley and Gerald Pearson had built operational versions from Lilienfeld's patents, yet they never referenced this work in any of their later research papers or historical articles.

Integrated circuit

1958 – First integrated circuit was produced but didn’t appear ‘til 1963. It was first used by NASA and the Military.

1971 – the Illiac IV supercomputer used about a quarter–million small–scale ECL logic gate integrated circuits to make up 64 parallel data processors

1966 – Hewlett–Packard entered the general purpose computer business offering a computational power formerly found only in much larger computers.

1969 – Data General shipped a total of 50,000 Novas. The Nova was one of the first 16–bit minicomputers and led the way toward word lengths that were multiples of the 8–bit byte.

1973 – the TV Typewriter, designed by Don Lancaster, provided electronics hobbyists with a display of alphanumeric information on an ordinary television set.

Operating System

An operating system is an interface between hardware and user; an OS is responsible for the management and coordination of activities and the sharing of the resources of the computer. It acts as a host for computing applications that are ran on the machine.

COMPUTER

CHIP

A Computer Chip is a small wafer of semiconductor material embedded with integrated circuitry. Chips comprise the processing and memory units of the modern digital computer.