It was late afternoon at a conference for the Institute of Radio Engineers. Many people giving talks had complained about the current germanium transistors -- they had a bad habit of not working at ...

When one thinks of the most significant dates in our technological development, October 18, 1954 doesn't pop up there at the top of the list. It should; 60 years ago the first portable transistor ...

So What Was the Transistor Good For? Transistors may have been useful to the phone company and to a handful of scientists building computers, but that wasn't enough to build an industry. Companies ...

The first transistors were point contact devices, not far from the cats-whiskers of early radio receivers. They were fragile and expensive, and their performance was not very high. The transistor ...

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, ...