When John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley invented the transistor in 1947, they changed the world in ways we are still discovering today. From their revolutionary building block, engineers could design and manufacture digital circuits far more complex than those possible earlier. Each decade that followed has seen a new generation of these devices: smaller, faster, and cheaper, often by orders of magnitude.
By the 1970s, corporations and universities could afford mainframe computers small enough to fit in a single room, and powerful enough that they could serve multiple users simultaneously. The minicomputer, a new and different kind of device, needed new and different kinds of ...
