Before the PC: The Great Revolution Sparked by the 'Tiny Crystal' Known as the Transistor - Memories of the Dawn of the Personal Computer

In the mid-1940s, the item kept on hand in the room housing the world's most advanced computer was not a screwdriver or a multimeter, but, for some reason, a flyswatter.

The room was filled with 18,000 vacuum tubes covering every wall. Insects, drawn to the intense heat and warm orange glow, would fly into the gaps in the circuits and cause short circuits. To remove these literal 'bugs,' technicians were constantly searching for insects and burnt-out vacuum tubes.

Electronic computers at the time were, in a sense, 'giant greenhouses.' More time was spent searching for and replacing faulty vacuum tubes than actually performing calculations. No matter how beautiful the logic designed, the underlying hardware would not last more than a few hours, so the frustration of the staff at the time is easy to imagine. The physical barrier was that the more one tried to make the computer larger and faster, the more the probability of failure skyrocketed.
What broke through this sense of stagnation in one fell swoop was a 'tiny stone crystal' that had escaped the glass tube.

From electrons flying through a vacuum to electrons slipping through a crystal

In December 1947, history was made at Bell Labs in the United States. It was the birth of the 'transistor,' created by William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain.

Vacuum tubes controlled the switching on and off by emptying the inside of a glass tube and causing electrons to fly into space from a heated metal. That is why a filament for heating was absolutely necessary, the glass could break, and it generated heat.

In contrast, the transistor was revolutionary. It controlled electrons not in a vacuum where nothing existed, but 'inside a solid such as germanium or silicon.' This was a victory for what is known as solid-state physics.

Instead of flying electrons inside a glass tube, they were made to slip through a silicon crystal lattice. Just by changing the way of thinking, the heater disappeared from a device that used to be so hot, and it fit into a size smaller than a fingertip. There were no moving parts and no filaments to burn out. The fact that there was no physical wear and tear raised the reliability of computers to literally astronomical levels.

Liberation from parasitic capacitance and a leap in processing speed

It was not just the size and durability that thrilled the engineers. The dimension of operating speed had changed.

In the era of vacuum tubes, the wiring connecting components was long, and excess 'parasitic capacitance' (stray capacitance) accumulated here and there in the circuits. Even when trying to pass electricity, these invisible little capacitors would get in the way, causing the signal rise to become sluggish.

When circuits were shrunk to the millimeter scale by transistors, this noise clinging to the wiring disappeared cleanly. The waveform would not collapse when the clock signal was increased. As a result, calculation speed made a sudden leap from the millisecond (1/1,000th of a second) range to the microsecond (1/1,000,000th of a second) range.

The human drama behind this wonderful invention is also quite profound.

The theorist Shockley burned with intense rivalry toward the achievements of Bardeen and Brattain, who had advanced the experiments and captured the phenomenon first. It is said that, incensed that a patent would be filed without him, he shut himself in a room alone and perfectly constructed the theory for a 'junction transistor,' which was structurally superior and more practical. And he did it in just a few months.
The raw energy, a mixture of the obsession and jealousy of geniuses, resulted in pushing this technological innovation forward at an explosive speed.

The day the monsters came down to the office

The arrival of the transistor fundamentally changed where computers were placed.

Monsters that occupied an entire floor of a building and required dedicated cooling plants began to fit into the size of a slightly large piece of office furniture. Entering the 1960s, manufacturers including IBM launched transistor-based commercial computers one after another. Computers spread from top-secret university laboratories and military facilities to the accounting departments and factories of general companies.

A black box that does not emit heat, rarely breaks, and silently performs calculations in an orderly row. The prototype of the 'modern IT infrastructure' that we imagine was born at this very moment.

From an era where humans were pushed around by the needs of machines, to machines that could be adapted to the needs of human business. It was undoubtedly thanks to this tiny crystal that computers became truly practical tools in the real sense.

Toward the next quiet madness of integration

Thanks to the transistor, computers were able to leave the room and shrink until they could be placed next to a desk. The fact that this didn't solve everything is what makes technology both interesting and terrifying.

When we tried to arrange thousands or tens of thousands of transistors to perform complex processing, a new wall stood in our way: "How are humans supposed to solder the countless copper wires connecting them?" This was the so-called labyrinth of wiring.

The end of the era of neatly arranging individual transistors. And so, the story slips into the era of integrated circuits (IC), where those elements and the wiring itself are "printed" together onto a single silicon board.

Having overcome heat, the electrons would now move their home into a labyrinth of substrates so microscopic they are invisible to the eye.

[Random Notes] The Invention of the Transistor and the Miniaturization and Performance Enhancement of Computers

1. Invention and Technological Innovation (Breaking Away from Vacuum Tubes)

(1) The Limits of Vacuum Tubes
Early large-scale computers like ENIAC used tens of thousands of vacuum tubes, making them massive (filling an entire room), generating huge amounts of heat, and suffering from frequent tube failures (disruptions) as a daily occurrence.

(2) The Invention of the Transistor (1947)
Invented by Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain at Bell Labs (1956 Nobel Prize in Physics).
Through switching and amplification mechanisms using semiconductors (silicon or germanium), it became a groundbreaking device that did not suffer from mechanical or thermal wear or filament burnout.

(3) Overwhelming Physical Advantages
Compared to vacuum tubes, they are smaller (fingertip-sized), energy-efficient, generate less heat, and have a longer lifespan.

2. Generational Shift in Computers (Evolution to the Second Generation)

(1) The Arrival of Second-Generation Computers (Late 1950s onwards)
Transitioning from the "first generation" using vacuum tubes to the "second generation" adopting transistors.
Processing speed took a massive leap from the millisecond (1/1,000th of a second) range to the microsecond (1/1,000,000th of a second) range.

(2) Explosive Improvement in Reliability and Uptime
In the vacuum tube era, it was said that "repair time was longer than calculation time," but the shift to transistors enabled long-term continuous operation, supporting the full-scale adoption of commercial use and scientific/technical calculations.

3. Development toward "Integrated Circuits (IC/LSI)" and Higher Density

(1) The Limits of Connecting Transistors (The Small Tyranny Problem)
With the method of soldering and wiring individual transistors in large quantities, wiring errors and connection failures increased, creating a limit to miniaturization (the labyrinth of wiring).

(2) The Invention of the IC (Integrated Circuit) (Late 1950s–1960s)
Jack Kilby, Robert Noyce, and others created the "IC," which integrated multiple transistors, resistors, and capacitors onto a single silicon substrate.

(3) Modularization and Further Miniaturization
The level of integration increased from ICs (Integrated Circuits) to LSIs (Large-Scale Integrated Circuits), paving the direct path for the later birth of the one-chip CPU (microprocessor: such as the Intel 4004).

4. Impact on Industry, Society, and Business (The Era of Popularization)

(1) From "Scientific Use" to "Office and General Business"
Computers that were once exclusive to massive national projects or university laboratories became compact enough (mainframes) to fit into a single office room for corporate core systems and data processing.

(2) The Impact of the IBM System/360 (1964)
By adopting general-purpose small modules (SLT) based on transistor technology, it became a worldwide bestseller as a computer capable of running everything from business to scientific calculations on the same architecture.

(3) The Omen of Miniaturization in Radios and Everyday Products
Prior to electronic computers, the spread of "transistor radios" and "desktop calculators" gave the general public a sense of a future where electronic devices could be small enough to keep on their desks.

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