WirtAtmar wrote:
>
> Although this is another in what might easily be seen as a tiresome
> litany of anniversaries, today, December 16, is the 50th anniversary
> of what has been said to be one of the most important events in the
> history of humanity -- and certainly the most important of this > century: the invention of the transistor.

See the special edition of Newsweek, _2000 - The Power of Invention_
for details on creation of the transistor.

> It was on this day 50 years ago that the transistor was clearly made
> to work by three physicist/engineers employed at Bell Labs: John
> Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley. On the 25th
> anniversary of the transistor's invention, Brattain said that he was
> deeply honored and humbled to have been associated with something
> that had so revolutionized the world -- but the world of
> transistorization in 1972 was nothing compared to that that exists
> now -- or will yet come to exist.

It was an interesting mix of personalities and egos involved.  Bardeen
and Brattain created the "contact transistor" which did work but never
quite took off.  Shockley left the team after being denied patent
privileges on the contact design and went on to create what we all know
as a transistor (the junction transistor) some years later.  Sony bought
out rights to the contact transistor for $25K and made some $50 radios,
but it wasn't until the junction transistor was in mass production that
things really took off.  Great reading - this is a special issue of
Newsweek, not a regular issue.  Blame any factual errors above on them,
not me :-)

{...snip about silence after a presentation on the early transistor...}

> It's important to remember stories like these the next time you give
> a talk.  If you get the same response, you may be onto something truly
> monumental.

People rarely ask me anything, maybe that's why I created HP3000-L :-)
But I don't think I have any monumental ideas to offer, I just thought
I was a boring speaker :-)

Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]>

PS - For those of you reading with full mail headers enabled, you may
notice that I'm now sending via cdc.net, but still retain my utc.edu
address.  Our PPP server fried yesterday, and I finally got a real
commercial ISP account.  Besides, our modems were only 14.4K :-)
Otherwise the address stays the same, I'm POPing mail from my utc
mailbox.