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Transistors are civilization’s invisible infrastructure
- joshbaptiste 4y agoIndeed.. just completed "Chip War" by Chris Miller which delves into the history and the Geopolitics of this wonderful invention. After WWII Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea owe their prosperities to the transistor.
- the_chatman 4y ago
- Victerius 4y agoYour comment reminds me of a line by Boromir (Sean Bean) in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. "It is a strange fate we should suffer so much fear and doubt… over so small a thing. Such a little thing." Where the little thing here is the transistor.
- thwarted 4y agoWhich reminded me of the mine scene from Back to the Future 3 Doc Brown examining a microchip with a magnifying glass "Unbelievable that this little piece of junk could be such a big problem. No wonder this circuit fails, it says 'Made in Japan'." Marty "Whadda mean, Doc? All the best stuff is made in Japan." Doc "Unbelievable"
- akeck 4y agoWould it be fair to call the past 5-7 decades the "Silicon Age" or the "Transistor Age"?
- doctorwho42 4y agoI think the transistor age would make more sense, it allows the age to cover a broader stretch of history. Think about things like the stone/bronze/iron ages, it's not any one new tool but the base technology itself. So if silicon gets supplanted I don't think we will stop using transistors. But who knows with quantum photonics, maybe laser/optic circuits will supplant a large chunk of silicon transistors in the next 100 years
- bluGill 4y agoOnly time will tell, but at least for now it seems like either will work for the next few thousand years. Iron is still important, and Bronze is still used, but Silicon seems the like backbone of our civilization now.
- thfuran 4y agoFor the next few thousand years? I sure wouldn't make a prediction about what technology is going to be important with a time horizon that long. Vacuum tubes are barely a century old.
- bee_rider 4y agoSI (in our ceramics) has been a popular construction and pottery material forever, pottery shards are, after all, one of the main ways that we distinguish which ancient cultures were spreading where. The problem with “Silicon age” is that use of lots of silicon is not a distinguishing factor for an age, haha.
- mkl95 4y agoHistorians of the future will probably refer to the dot-com bubble as the start of the Silicon Age. But another take could be that the silicon and transistor age started at the same time with commercial silicon transistors (mid 50s).
- Retric 4y agoHistorians lump ever longer stretches of time together the further into the past stuff becomes. I suspect they will start pre WWII with mechanical calculators or focus on computer networks as the defining moment.
- bee_rider 4y agoComputational, analytical, scientific, or something like that, maybe?
- loloquwowndueo 4y agoTransistors made of non-silicon materials have existed for a long time.
- jl6 4y agoNo, I think the concept of ages is itself a historiographic fiction that peaked in the 20th century, as an attempt to impose order and narrative on the unstructured chaos of history. But they are one-dimensional, westcentric, and IMHO obsolete.
- layer8 4y ago“Silicon Age” is being used, though “Information Age” and “Digital Age” are more common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Age
- magicalhippo 4y agoI mean transistors are neat and all, but what really sets things apart for me is integrated circuits. When you look at the size of the discrete MOnSter 6502 CPU[1], featured here[2] recently, and realize it has around 3k transistors and the latest CPUs and GPUs have several billion... And not just transistors, but analog circuits as well, allowing for extremely compact designs. [1]: https://monster6502.com/ https://monster6502.com/ [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33841901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33841901
- ghaff 4y agoThe real driving force for about the last 40 years--starting with PCs, then larger systems, and eventually almost everything--was integrated circuits using CMOS technology. CMOS process shrinks have been an incredible lever. Not the only one of course but a major one. The transistor itself was an incredibly important inventions of course but it's the ability to pack so many of them economically into a very small amount of space that really delivered on its promise.
- bee_rider 4y agoTransistor, information, or automation could be good I think. Another option maybe — what really distinguishes our civilization right now is that we’ve integrated out economies around the entire planet, so “global age” might be a good candidate. Silicon is present in sand, so we’ve been using it forever in ceramics, on some level. Like copper, it has been a good friend to humanity for a very long time. The only problem is that “using lots of SI” is not a distinguishing characteristic for an age! We call it the Iron Age because iron is a grumpy, unfriendly element that didn’t want to help out until we got some pretty fancy forges. Maybe we could use it to mark some larger scales. Silicon age could start around 25k years ago with the invention of pottery. Before that, I dunno, fire age or rock age.
- maxwell 4y agoIf you're going for a modern version of "Ages of Humanity" akin to Hesiod/Ovid, sure, if not Digital or Information. But Stone/Copper/Bronze/Iron refer specifically to the dominant material for crafting weaponry. In that sense, maybe we're in the transition between Steel and Plastic, though maybe a case could be made for Lead. Or we really are in the Nuclear Age, and it becomes the Final Age of Humanity. Or war has gone digital, and we are in the Information Age, beyond terrestrial materials. In that case, true Space and then Atomic (universal assembler) Ages may follow.
- mycall 4y agoHistorians have been calling it the Information Age. Transistors is just gating or amplifying information over electricity.
- kens 4y agoThe IBM 1401 was the most popular computer of the early 1960s, with over 10,000 produced. It was built from germanium (not silicon) transistors. So silicon shouldn't get all the credit.
- euroderf 4y agoLet's reserve the term "Silicon Age" for when they take over.
- pkoird 4y agoAs a child, presumably like many others, I was pretty enthralled by the concept of magic, magical formations, spells, and etc. And it was equally disheartening to not find oneself in such a world. But growing up, I realized that we already have magic in our world, which we call electricity. We have formations to harness its powers, which would be the chips, and we have spells aka coding to bring them all together to literally perform magic.
- loloquwowndueo 4y agoAnd watch cat videos. :)
- Koshkin 4y agoThe high-quality moving images on a flat screen still feel like magic.
- PartiallyTyped 4y agoI grew up with Harry Potter and now I express that I eventually became a wizard. I just scribble runes onto paper, then do clicky-clacks on my keyboard translating the runes into spells and make machines do magic.
- pjmorris 4y agoDanny Hillis makes a similar analogy in 'The Pattern on the Stone', where he reasons that if someone 200-300 years ago where told what he did for work he'd be burned as a witch.
- Kye 4y ago400-500 might be closer to accurate. 200-300 years ago was deep into the Enlightenment and well past the Scientific Revolution. Witch trials were already a fringe and rare thing by the 1600s.
- constantcrying 4y ago
- carapace 4y agoThere are pretty much only three major inventions (he claimed boldly, hoping to spark a fun and informative discussion): The Haber-Bosch Process, without which none of us would be here reading this today. The transistor. 'natch. Rare earth magnets (which enable small strong motors, which enable tiny drones and factories, which revolutionizes economics.)
- Yahivin 4y agoAnd all made possible by abundant energy from petroleum products.
- euroderf 4y agoThe lesson is that any damned fool can have a prospering economy when he's got energy to burn. But in the transition from petroleum to fusion & renewables, it is necessary to be a bit more clever. Rotsa ruck!
- infiniteUnivers 4y ago> In fact, each of us is surrounded by billions, if not trillions of transistors, none of which are visible to the naked eye. * glances over at bins of assorted TO-92 and TO-220's * checkmate, Mr. Goldstein.
- mikepurvis 4y agoFair, though even still, those are hidden away in little plastic boxes. The actual meat of a transistor isn't really visible except by analogue, eg observing an equivalent behaviour going on inside a glass vacuum tube.
- Aissen 4y agoIsn't this 20th century history 101 ? Not much to dispute here, but might bear repeating.
- glasss 4y agoI'd be willing to say electromagnetic waves and signals are the true invisible, magic infrastructure. But of course transistors and ICs do most of the magic.
- ThrowawayTestr 4y agoWifi still blows my mind.
- johnohara 4y ago"The Computing Machines in the Future" (1985) http://cse.unl.edu/~seth/434/Web%20Links%20and%20Docs/Feynman-future%20computing%20machines.pdf http://cse.unl.edu/~seth/434/Web%20Links%20and%20Docs/Feynma... In section 3, Reducing the Size, he speculates having a billion transistors in a computer, then immediately qualifies his statement. That was almost thirty years ago.
- photochemsyn 4y agoThis article has a link to the IEEE electonic devices meeting, and flipping through the presentations, optical interconnects come up, leading to the still rather sci-fi notion of the photonic computer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_transistor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_transistor > "In principle, all-optical digital signal processing and routing is achievable using optical transistors arranged into photonic integrated circuits. The same devices could be used to create new types of optical amplifiers to compensate for signal attenuation along transmission lines."
- stevenwoo 4y agoWhenever I read sci-fi stories and there is talk of self replicating robots/factories/machines or even generation ships, there is a huge jump in technology/magic that is never discussed - what technology is used to replace semiconductors - because a portable semiconductor fab seems so outside the realm of possibility now. It would be such a revolutionary change that it's outside the realm of speculation besides handwaving at bioengineered replacements or easy atomic level manipulation ala The Culture series.
- speed_spread 4y agoI assume in those stories that nanotech has displaced photolithography in the fabrication of microelectronics. If you can get nanoassemblers to reliably produce a simple CPU, you can pick up the slack through software and bootstrap from there.
- TeMPOraL 4y agoMy thinking is: there are many ways to make matter do compute. Semiconductor-based digital logic chips are only one of many possibilities. You can make an analog computer from just about anything, it's a matter of identifying things you can interpret as flows and stores (or, as the professors who taught control systems at my uni, faucets, drains and bathtubs), and arranging them just right. You can make a digital computer from just about anything too - it's a matter of identifying things you can interpret as a NAND gate, and stacking them just right. You can encode a neural network model as grooves in plastic sheets, stack them into layers, and have it naturally process incoming light. Etc. The possibilities are limitless, because computing is more about your mental model, and less about the substrate itself. So I imagine, the breakthrough for nanotech will be when someone figures out a way to make some kind of programmable computer that works at nanoscale, can be easily produced, and is somewhat robust against the environment. It doesn't need to be a fast computer - we're used to multi-GHz CPUs and multi-MHz microcontrollers, but at nanoscale, even an equivalent of an old 8008 will do, or even something much weaker: single nanobot doesn't need much compute. You'll be deploying them by thousands or millions at a time anyway, and you'll want to program them as a swarm anyway.
- 4y ago
- sockaddr 4y agoTransistors are the dominant life-form on Earth.
- euroderf 4y agoTransistors form the nervous systems of the dominant life form, motor vehicles.
- squarefoot 4y agoI can't but think of this analogy: Transistors are like Judo. You can use them by keeping your feet firmly on the ground, then applying a small amount of energy to a point (base current) you can control and use to your advantage a much bigger energy that comes from the opponent (collector current through the load).