Electronics: The Next Generation
December 26th, 2009 by ComputerBob
When I was growing up, my paternal grandparents had one of those big, old AM radios that you can only see in museums nowadays.
Its outside consisted of a dark, heavy, wooden cabinet that stood about four feet (122 cm) tall and about two feet (61 cm) wide and deep.
Inside that cabinet, the “guts” of the radio included several vacuum tubes. Each time you turned on the radio, those power-hungry tubes had to warm up to skin-melting temperatures before they worked correctly. And because they also got weaker over time, and eventually burned out, you had to frequently remove them and take them to a local radio shop, where you could plug them into a tube-testing machine, one at a time, to test them and replace the weak and dead ones.
My biological family’s radio was small enough to fit onto an end table, but it — and our black-and-white television set — used that same vacuum tube technology, and I went along for the ride on many of those trips to the radio shop. There I studied the tube tester’s many sockets and knobs, and waited in anticipation for its needle gauge to declare whether each tube was good, weak, or dead.
My biological father was relieved when he bought our very first TV that used tiny, much-more-reliable transistors instead of tubes.
Before too long, he also bought a battery powered “transistor radio” that was smaller than a sheet of typing paper, and only about 3 inches thick.
As a pre-teen, I got my first personal transistor radio — a very small, very inexpensive plastic box a little bigger than my hand that was “Made in Japan,” back in the days when that phrase was another way of saying “It was really cheap but it’s very low quality.” Nowadays, the phrase, “I got it at Walmart” means the same thing.
I think it was in my mid-teens when we got our very first color TV — a black, 20-something-inch Panasonic from some sort of discount warehouse.
Then someone figured out how to miniaturize transistors and mount many of them together onto integrated circuits.
And integrated circuits gave birth to the personal computer — a box that was small enough to fit on a desktop, yet was many times more powerful than early vacuum tube-powered mainframe computers that took up an entire floor of office space and required full-time employees to test and replace their tubes.
But electronic continued to get even smaller.
Current integrated circuit fabrication technology can squeeze the equivalent of more than one million miniaturized transistors into one square millimeter.
And now, things are about to get even smaller.
Because recently, “Researchers showed the first functional transistor made from a single molecule.”
I guess it all just goes to prove the old saying: Nature abhors a vacuum.
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