this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2024
152 points (96.3% liked)
Asklemmy
43807 readers
920 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
In Electronics world? Bipolar junction Transistors. Easily.
This led into having portable devices we have today.
Back then people used vacuum tubes for switching and amplification; of which were very expensive to run (used a lot of power when idle, while having a very short lifespan of less than 48 hrs).
I mean, vacuum tubes where phenomenal when they came, allowed first long distance calls in 1915.
Look at my phone now, fits on my hands, and has billions of transistors!
Post script: lately I've been thinking, what if we remove cell towers as middle men? Because nowadays privacy is somewhat dead. People have been using radio frequency for walkie-talkies even before 1st generation communication (1G) was a thing.
This video enlightened my day ๐
It's just a matter of time now
Its crazy that we're now approaching 200 million transistors in a single square millimetre. Boggles the mind.
I was thinking the photolithography process might be almost as important as the transistor itself. Without the ability to miniaturize transistors and create integrated circuits, we wouldn't have anywhere near the level of technology we can build now. A computer made of discrete transistors would be way more efficient, reliable, and cheaper than one made with vacuum tubes, but would still be very limited. There are things you fundamentally couldn't do with even thousands of discrete transistors that became possible once we were able to scale to millions and now billions.
Very true