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Were the first point-contact transistors that were developed in the 1940s at Bell Labs and that consisted of a piece of gold foil stretched over a plastic wedge
by DebtDeflation 2y ago
Were the first point-contact transistors that were developed in the 1940s at Bell Labs and that consisted of a piece of gold foil stretched over a plastic wedge which was then cut by hand at the tip and pressed against a block of germanium stacked on a metal base, a computer or an experiment?
- fxwin 2y agoWhat were they used for?
- DebtDeflation 2y agoExperiments to show that solid-state materials were capable of amplifying or switching one electric voltage/current with another. I'm not disputing that these later became the building blocks for computers, just as the quantum gate experiments being conducted in laboratories today may become the building blocks for quantum computers in the future. But that's not where we are now.
- fxwin 2y agoThen i wouldn't call them computers, just like i wouldn't call experiments with single quantum gates computers. But if a physics experiment utilizes quantum processes to factorize a number (even if it's only the number 21), then I'd call that a computation, and the experimental setup a computer.