Way back in the salad days of digital computing (the 1940s and '50s), computers were made of vacuum tubes -- big, hot, clunky devices that, when you got right down to it, were essentially glorified ...

On Oct. 3, 1950, three scientists at Bell Labs in New Jersey received a U.S. patent for what would become one of the most important inventions of the 20th century — the transistor. John Bardeen, ...

A vacuum tube, known as the first electronic device, is used to switch, amplify, or commutate electric signals. In the past, vacuum tubes functioned as a main part of a diverse range of electronic ...

Most people associate vacuum tubes with a time when a single computer took up several rooms and "debugging" meant removing the insects stuck in the valves, but this technology may be in for a ...

The transistor revolutionized the world and made the abundant computing we now rely on a possibility, but before the transistor, there was the vacuum tube. Large, hot, power hungry, and prone to ...

When thinking of retrocomputing, many of us will imagine machines such as the Commodore 64 or Apple II. These computers were very popular and have plenty of parts and documentation available. Fewer ...

The telephone company had problems with vacuum tubes, too, and hoped to find something else to use for switching telephone calls. The idea of somehow using semiconductors (solid materials such as ...

The transistor is one of the most profound innovations in all of human existence. First discovered in 1947, it has scaled like no advance in human history; we can pack billions of transistors into ...

Before transistors and microchips, engineers had limited options for building computing machines. Light bulbs, known as ...