3 ms·

The transistor was patented in the twenties already but only created in the forties. I wonder what could have been possible if the information revolution happen

• Animats 11y ago
  Someone discovered that a 3-terminal semiconductor device could be built using copper oxide as a semiconductor in the 1920s. But copper oxide is a lousy semiconductor, and it was a lousy transistor. So it was just an interesting lab phenomenon. It wasn't until Bell Labs finally figured out the physics behind semiconduction in the 1950s that transistors really worked. But suppose someone like Edison had gotten hold of the 1920s transistor lab experiment and tried to make it better by trying many different materials. (That's how he got a usable, cheap light bulb filament; thousands of materials were tried, ending with carbonized paper.) They would have tried selenium (selenium rectifiers were known) and galena crystals (crystal radios were known). They probably would have gotten a point-contact transistor out of galena, which would have led to germanium. It would have been unreliable and heat-sensitive until germanium purification was figured out. They might have tried grey tin, which is a semiconductor but a dead end. They probably wouldn't have tried silicon, because you have to grow silicon crystals first, which is hard and wasn't done until 1950. So a transistor radio might have been demoed by 1930 or so.