The Transistor

It has to be the transistor.

This was the start of the age of miniturised silicon based digital computing which has driven or enabled all of the technological developments of the past 50 years..

Early technological developments led to ever larger structures and machines. But the silicon transistor reversed this trend, initiating an era of ever increasing miniturisation, and leading directly to digital computers and telecommunications..

Stone Age, Iron Age, Bronze Age, Digital Age - during which life for most humans on Planet Earth has been totally transformed in only a few decades. The transistor was the catalyst.

The digital descendants of the transistor have already touched the lives of virtually every human being on this planet, and they will inevitably help humans living on other planets in the future.

Digital computing was a key technology that enabled mankind to walk on the Moon, and already there are two silicon based digital intelligences driving around on Mars. Once day soon Earth’s carbon based life forms will join them, and then together we will move on to the more distant planets, and then out to the stars.

The humble transistor will evolve into nano-technologies and ultimately to silicon based Artificial Intelligences which will live alongside the carbon based lifeforms that created them. One day these silicon based lifeforms will look back to the 1947 silicon transistor as their genesis…their earliest common ancestor…and the start of their evolutionary adventure.

No other patent marks the beginning of a new lifeform…

Submitted by: COLIN BOYD