1) Flemming Stassen

This paper was presented on 1. October at the `Electroconference 1997' organized by  E-gruppen  under the Society of Danish Engineers.
Flemming Stassen is with the Department of Information Technology, Technical University of Denmark (DTU). Phone (+45) 4525 3753, email stassen@it.dtu.dk.

2) ...grow exponentially with time

This is also known as Moore's law: The integration density is quadroupled every 2 years. In industrial processes, the continued, exponential reduction in production costs, sometimes called learning, is not unfamiliar. However, the growth rate, a 50% learning curve over four decades, is!

3) transistor

The word transistor was not used until several months after the invention of the device. The word is an abbreviation of transfer resistor and is ascribed to John R. Pierce of Bell Labs.

4) Julius Edgar Lilienfeld

The patent describes how to control an electrical current in a thin film using an electrostatic potential for use in an amplifier circuit

5) size, weight, and power consumption were severely constrained

The historical fact is that early efforts to miniaturize electronic components were not motivated by computer engineers. Indeed, the potential of the digital computer was not quickly appreciated for civilian economy.

6) Several technology developments

Solid-state impurity diffusion, photolithographic processing, wafer batch processing, etc.

7) silicon planar technology

The technology progressed during the early 1950s, using germanium as the semiconductor material. However, germanium proved unsuitable in certain applications because of its propensity to exhibit high junction leakage currents. For this reason, silicon became a practical substitute and has almost fully supplanted germanium as a material for solid-state device fabrication.

8) the same monolithical structure

The various components are interconnected using metal lines `on top' of the circuit, i.e.\ the metal lines are formed as part of the process

9) MOS field-effect transistors (MOSFET)

Bipolar logic `looses' for the very same reason that haunted the vacuum tubes; the large power consumption limits the number of transistors that can be placed on a single die.

10) 19,000 vacuum tubes

As a consequence, the Mean-Time-Between-Failure was of the order of a few hours. Note the position of the oscilloscope in the center of the room. Early programmers recall designing software programs, I quote "taking into account the MTBF". The introduction of transistors immediately raised the value of the MTBF by decades.

Author: Flemming Stassen
(http://www.it.dtu.dk/~stassen/Edu/49260/Historie)