It was late afternoon at a conference for the Institute of Radio Engineers. Many people giving talks had complained about the current germanium transistors -- they had a bad habit of not working at ...

The first transistor was about half an inch high. That's mammoth by today's standards, when 7 million transistors can fit on a single computer chip. It was nevertheless an amazing piece of technology.

The first transistors were point contact devices, not far from the cats-whiskers of early radio receivers. They were fragile and expensive, and their performance was not very high. The transistor ...