Consume Product

It's pretty incredible.

Except that part came *after* the the crucial invention

> A piece of gold foil was glued to the edge of a triangular plastic wedge, and then the foil was sliced with a razor at the tip of the triangle. The result was two very closely spaced contacts of gold. When the plastic was pushed down onto the surface of a germanium crystal and voltage applied to the other side (on the base of the crystal), current started to flow from one contact to the other as the base voltage pushed the electrons away from the base towards the other side near the contacts. The point-contact transistor had been invented.

That was "just" minaturization and power reduction. Valve Amps provide the same switching mechanism.

And so do relays.


Here's the 1958 Famcom computer, not a melted silicon rock in sight - just copper from copper ore - mainly Chalcopyrite at the time, and iron.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_j544ELauus

Black people invented them /s

Tapping in to a higher source of knowledge.

> How did they figure this out?

The concept of a semiconductor.

Once we had that, we realized we could turn currents on and off.

Once we had that, we took all the knowledge we had already accumulated building mechanical computers with transistors.

Getting transistors into tiny pieces of silicon took quite a bit of work. Lots of chemistry and optics and such.

From there, it's millions of little ideas all put together to make it incrementally better.

The future of silicon, by the way, is lowering the power requirements. Using less power, we can pack more transistors into smaller spaces, even build in 3D. Hopefully we'll have entire computers that can run on very low power sources. Think nuclear batteries the size of a fingernail powering your phone for 50 years with no recharging. Heck, even the piezo-electric effect (small pressure creates voltage and current) could be enough to power the next generation of CPUs.

logic gates

I mean, I’ve read that it’s pretty demonic. The guy who invented it would dig ditches in his yard because “that’s when the voices would talk to him” and tell him what the next step was.