


The tube would be turned off for a zero, and on for a one. It's probably doubled from what it would have been without transistors."īefore transistors, vacuum tubes were turned on or off to represent zeros and ones. Look at the change in the productivity of the whole economy. Look at transportation, computers, government, finance, manufacturing. "The invention of the transistor was probably the most important invention in the 20th century," said Risto Puhakka, president of VLSI Research Inc. That 10,000 times the number of ants on Earth. Intel estimates that about 10 quintillion (or a 1 followed by 19 zeros) transistors ship each year.Today, a 45-nanometer Penryn chip from Intel holds 820 million transistors.It was powered by transistors and cost $3,995.

introduced the first commercial mobile phone, the DynaTAC 800X. Busicom introduced the first single-chip, pocket-size calculator, the LE-120A HANDY, in 1971.Forty-two years later, Moore's Law still holds true. Intel Corp.'s Gordon Moore in 1965 came up with what came to be known as Moore's Law, which stated that the number of transistors on a chip will double about every two years.screen and used 23 silicon and germanium transistors. introduced the first portable, transistorized TV, the TV8-301, in 1960. The first transistor radio, the Regency TR-1, went on the market for $49.99 in 1954.The first commercial device to use a transistor was the Sonotone 1010 hearing aid, created in 1953.

