How old is the electronics?
Who can say?
How can we say that, when the electronics started?
The answer is very difficult.
As long as the memory goes back we can say that in Greek and Indian mythology the people having extraordinary power were able to send message very quickly. So, what was the basis of that technology? Were they using any kind of wireless devices, whose components are electronic as today’s wireless devices. What ever it may be there is no clear idea of those technologies or no proof that whether they were using those things.
In the 21st century we are enjoying well developed electronics. In some form or the other everyday we deal with the electronic devices several times. So why we are interested to look at the past? Because it is required. Like the history of a nation from which its people get inspired (or learn something from their past faults) the history of any science inspires its future generations. Even more than that those who spent their whole life for the inventions/discoveries, they did not do that for themselves rather they did it for the whole society, the whole world. So we should tribute them. This electronic world was not just the effort of some years or decades, rather it is the result of the hard work of great minds since ages. So now it is the time to remember them.
In the coming sections the whole scenario of the development of the electronics in the whole world have been looked at in a chronological order. Also their effects on the contemporary society and economy have been analysed.
Discovery of the transistor Effect
The diode valves of the early twentieth century were large enough to be inside the electronic devices and they had many other problems like high power consumption, low reliability and the requirement of good cooling arrangements etc. So the electrical engineers and physicists at that time tried for the development of some alternatives which can fill up the place of troublesome vacuum tube in case of both the detectors and amplifiers. At that time the physics of solids were also on its way to bloom. Many theories like the Fermi-Dirac equations had opened the wide scale research on the solids. In Bell labs the scientists were desperately looking for some alternative to the vacuum diodes and triodes for the communication technology.
After the end of the horrible WW2 the whole world took some rest. But the scientific community who were working in the war forcefully or by the motivation of the country’s top leaders did not rest. Rather they started their original intended works at their previous work places. The scenario in the US was also not much different. After the war the economy was weak. So the industrial research was mainly focused on the economic development. Bell labs too took some leading in the development of the communication sciences. The research group in the Bell Labs found that the existing technology and the devices for better communication were not available at that time. So their main concern was to find some alternative for the existing amplifiers. The valve amplifiers were the main obstacle in the road of progress. So, they looked for some solid state devices. The findings of Russell Ohl had confirmed that the pure silicon when doped with some impurities of tri and penta-valent materials can be used as two layers of a PN junction diode. They had some foresights that, the junction phenomenon may be used for the building of a new amplifier. The group led by William Shockley was investigating these facts. Other team members were Morgan, Bardeen, Brattain, Gibney, Moore and Pearson.
Fortune favours the brave. The auspicious day came and the science started growing at an exponential rate there after. Thanks to the genius of the three young scientists of the Bell labs. They found a new concept known as “Transistor effect”. It was for the first time discovered by Bardeen and Brattain. That is known as point contact transistor. That was mainly contributed by Brattain and Bardeen, who thought that the effects are mainly due to some surface phenomenon. But Shockley was not dormant. He too was working hard on something different, which is today known as n-p-n transistor. He gave the theory that the transistor effect was due to some bulk phenomenon. After that he worked hard on the semiconductor theories and gave a satisfactory explanation to the transistor effect. His book “Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors” is a popular book today as well. Despite these two available models of transistor there were some other problems which were barriers in the production of transistors in large scale.
The Endless Journey after Transistor
The real electronics what it is called today was actually started after the discovery of the transistor effect. Transistor opened the road for the electronics and there after electronics got its independent identity in electrical engineering. More importantly it opened the road for the computing world. Computers of various types started hitting the market and the research works got a boost.
Some other problems were also there like the assembling of the electronic components on a single mother board. It was worsened when the metallic contacts cross each other and crowded the mother board. Jack Kilby in Texas Instruments found a very nice solution. He suggested to throw away all the wires and tried to connect the resistors, capacitors and transistors on the same piece of wafer internally. Surprisingly his ideas worked and gave birth to the Integrated Circuit industries. At around the same time Shockley had left Bell Labs and started his own company in California, whose name was Shockley Semiconductor. Some other brilliant young researchers also joined his company there. Among them who are famous today are Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce and Jean Hoerni. Robert Noyce also did many contributions to the IC technology by joining the Fairchild Company and the Fairchild Semiconductor was born. By the efforts of both Noyce and Kilby the IC industry became very popular and looked forward for its next successor, the microprocessor. Another history was being made in the USSR at the same time. The first artificial satellite Sputnik was sent to the space. There was a big demand for the better electronic components for the control and performance of the satellite and other electrical devices like the big motors and generators. Huge demand of transistors and ICs revolutionised the electronics industry at that time. A new type of transistor was invented in early sixties, which is known as MOSFET. MOSFET is slower than the junction transistor but it is smaller, chipper and consumes less power.
In 1965 Gordon Moore came out with an awesome paper called “Cramming more Components onto Integrated Circuits”. In that paper he described that the number of transistors used on a singe chip of silicon will grow exponentially. In 1968 Rob Noyce and Moore left Fairchild to start Intel, both of whom were very popular already in the field of microelectronics. In 1971 their company invented the first microprocessor well known as 4004 having 2300 transistors on one silicon chip. The credit mainly goes to the young engineer Ted Hoff. While working on a Japanese project he found some problems with integrated circuits and planned to have even larger integrated circuits which can have the whole computer on a single chip. That microprocessor led the way to the successors like the 8080, 8085, 80486, Pentium series and the most modern processors like the Xeon too.
The Effect on Computing
One of the most important and admirable creation of the 20th century scientists was the invention of computer. That’s why many say that 20th century is the century of computers. The needs of computers were at peak during the WWII. In Britain the German-code breaking project was being done by Colossus, one of the early computers. At the same time another general purpose programmable computer was being used in Harvard University which was built with help of IBM. The main aim was to break the security codes of the enemy. Keeping this in mind the ENIAC was invented in the University of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia. It was a huge computer of 30 tonnes, was fairly fast and having many vacuum diodes and triodes in the operation. It had covered some rooms and many of its parts were mechanical. The discovery of the transistor effect gave birth to new ideas for new computers. They are popularly known as second generation computers. The efforts of Jack Kilby and Rob Noyce gave birth to the third generation computers, which used the ICs and the companies like IBM started the mainframe machines having more storage capacity and faster speed.
After the invention of the first microprocessor 4004 in 1971 in Intel everyone in the microelectronic industries thought that microprocessors can help in the rapid growth of computers. They started many new projects in inventing new microprocessors and the forth generation of computers started. The first personal computer built was the Altair 8800 of MITS which came around 1975. At the same time Apple computer was started and the first Apple machines hit the market in 1976.
Many companies now got ready to provide computers at the household level. Among them the front runners were IBM and Apple. In parallel to the development in the hardware the software industry was also blooming. There ware many operating systems and computer languages at the starting of 70s. The most popular languages were FORTRAN, COBOL and PASCAL etc. But the C language by Dennis Ritchie found to be very helpful in system programming. Even today C has that dominance. In the early eighties the most popular OOP technology was started with the birth of C++. Of course some object oriented features were present in some other languages like Ada, Smalltalk and FORTRAN. At the end of the nineties the new technologies like the Java helped a lot in the development of the web. Then the scenario was stolen by software companies like the Microsoft and Oracle who made the computing very popular and the computers no more remained a tool of the scientific community.
At the same time there was a huge demand for the time limited tasks, which were nearly impossible by the general computers. So the faster computers or the supercomputers were in the mind of many scientists. Among them the front runner was Seymour Cray, who started the supercomputer industry form his Cray series. Unlike the general computers the super computers were using a large number of parallel processors and high speed logics like the ECL.
If we shall consider yesterday as history then there are many things which can be put in history each day. That is due to the rapid growth in the IT industry, its concerned global market and the ultra fast research and development through out the world. Thus while considering the history of electronics we should take some time boundary to consider which is history and which is not. In this case let us take the things of the early nineties as history.
So in this section the most famous inventions of the early nineties and late eighties have been considered. The domain name system and http were already in use just after their birth, but still the networking of the computers was not that spread. Only some universities of the US and Europe were connected to each other and that was mainly for the research purpose. At that time in CERN many researcher of the whole world were doing some research on the high energy physics. They were using their own system for their own research. So, a lot of varieties of computers were really a problem to share the research data. One of those researchers thought of the interconnection of the computers to form a common network. He tried it using the existing protocols like the http, ftp, and DNS etc. In addition to that he added a new framework which is now popularly known as WWW or the World Wide Web. The internet was born. The whole knowledge banks of the world, the whole information regarding anything are just now clicks away. It became possible due to that great person Tim Berners-Lee.
The history of electronics is really a vast area and it is not possible to present the whole details of the systematic history in this limited scope. Anyway electronics which started as philosophy then physics then electrical engineering has now got its own identity and going to be even more diverse in the future. There is no doubt that the modern electronics as we see it today started from the birth of the vacuum diode of Sir Ambrose Fleming. On the centenary year we should remember that great man and both his predecessors and successors. The changes of 20th century are mainly due to electronics, there no doubt about it. All the systems today are almost electronic.
So at last it can be said that the history of electronics is as rich as the electronics itself. Through ages the developments in electronics have started. The future seems to be very bright. The new fields like the quantum communication and bioinformatics are going to be the leading areas of studies in the future which can take the human civilisation to a great high.
The history of electronics is widespread and cannot be described in a paper of limited words. This paper is just one of the bird’s eye views on the history of electronics. Here it has been tried to include almost all the great works and the persons behind them. The discovery of the transistor effect has been considered as the development of the modern electronics. But the trail is mainly to find out what led to the discovery of the transistor and what its after effects are. Anyway it is great to remember the great minds on this occasion.
