The transistor was imagined in 1925, two decades before anyone built one
Julius Lilienfeld described a field-effect transistor in 1925, but the device that finally worked came from Bell Labs in 1947, and the silicon version that made modern chips possible only arrived in 1960. The gap between an idea and a buildable part shaped the whole story of computing.
Electronics entered the field through a side door. In 1931 C. E. Wynn-Williams published the first recorded proposal to use digital electronics for counting, aimed at tallying physical events at high speed. Seven years later Claude Shannon showed that switching circuits could carry out Boolean algebra, the logic of true and false. Before any of this, computing meant pen, paper, chalk, slate and printed tables, and the abacus, probably invented in Babylon between 2700 and 2300 BC, is still in use.
John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, working under William Shockley, made the first point-contact transistor in 1947. Manchester's first transistorised computer followed in 1953, but early junction transistors were bulky and hard to mass-produce. In 1957 Frosch and Derick at Bell Labs made silicon dioxide transistors with their terminals side by side on the surface, and a working MOSFET came in 1960. That design allowed dense integrated circuits and set off the microcomputer revolution.
The vocabulary grew alongside the hardware. Software was coined as a contrast to the older word hardware, and it splits into system software, which runs the machine and includes operating systems, drivers and firmware, and applications, which do things for the user. When one popular app runs only on a single platform and makes people buy that platform, it is called a killer application, and sometimes a lone programmer writes the prototype for one.
Software engineering has a birthday of sorts. The phrase first appeared at a 1968 NATO conference, meant to provoke thinking about a perceived software crisis. Its core ideas were later collected in a body of knowledge that became the international standard ISO/IEC TR 19759:2015. Meanwhile networks tied everything together, from Ethernet in local offices to the TCP/IP protocols that serve billions of internet users.
Source: Computing
