The transistor's 1947 spark still names our whole era
The Information Age, dating from mid-twentieth-century shifts from Industrial Revolution industries toward information technology, is often tied to the 1947 transistor. UN public-administration writers stress computer miniaturization and internet communications as social evolution's new engine.
Calculating machines have a long lineage: the abacus and astrolabe, slide rules and mechanical calculators from the 1600s, then mass-produced arithmometers and punch cards in the early 1800s. Charles Babbage designed a general-purpose Analytical Engine that was never built and was mostly forgotten by the time modern computers appeared. In the 1880s Herman Hollerith's punch-card tabulators spread through business and government, and analog machines modelled everything from tides, in an 1872 predictor, to Dutch water management and gun aiming.
Digital computing arrived during the Second World War. Konrad Zuse finished the Z3 in 1941, the first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer; Allied engineers built electromechanical bombes to crack Enigma; and Harvard's decimal Mark I ran from 1944. In 1947 John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, working under William Shockley at Bell Labs, made the first working transistor, a germanium point-contact device, and a year later Claude Shannon's paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication laid the theoretical foundations of digitisation.
Miniaturisation then took off. Jack Kilby reached the first integrated-circuit milestone in 1958, Robert Noyce produced a monolithic chip at Fairchild in 1959 using Jean Hoerni's planar process, and Chih-Tang Sah and Frank Wanlass developed CMOS in 1963. By 1964 MOS chips were denser and cheaper than bipolar ones, and by the late 1960s hundreds of transistors fitted on one chip, the basis for microprocessors. In 1969 Willard Boyle and George Smith at Bell Labs built the charge-coupled device that later made digital cameras possible.
Networks digitised in parallel: AT&T's T1 lines from 1962 carried 24 voice channels at 64 kilobits per second each. Digital formats allowed perfect copies and lossless relaying, and in the 1980s compact discs displaced analog records. Whether artificial intelligence and biotechnology now mark a fourth industrial revolution remains an open argument.
Source: Information Age
