A decade of contradictions: infinite hope for the future coupled with fear of powerful enemies. That is the 1950s, a time of war and then of post-war prosperity. Rock and roll was evolving from rhythm and blues, soon to be heard blaring from transistor radios from Spokane to Baltimore. Crew-cut kids watched across TV dinners as tales of space travel and futuristic dreams flickered across the screens of RCA consoles. Gas was cheap, tailfins were large, and Americans were consummating their love affair with the open road. The future seemed limitless, and as the decade dawned, few even realized why. But as the 1940s drew to a close, a handful of engineers had made a breakthrough that ultimately would change the world.
The infant born in 1947 to Bardeen, Brittain, and Shockley—the point-contact transistor—came of age in the 1950s. It matured into Shockley's junction transistor, which found a home in countless military and consumer applications. The solid-state age had begun, pushing the electronics industry toward modern digital computers and communications. Transistors ran cooler and demanded far less power than the vacuum tubes they would begin replacing, producing smaller, faster, and more powerful electronics. Initially costly to produce, transistors in the fifties began the trend that the electronics industry has continued ever since: ever-lower cost coupled with greater functionality and integration. Transistor process technology was refined throughout the decade, which culminated in the development of the first integrated circuit.
Necessity is indeed the mother of invention, and never was necessity greater than during the wars of the 1940s and early fifties. The massive efforts stemming from World War II, the Korean conflict, and the ensuing Cold War resulted in the mobilization of America's greatest scientific minds. The tense geopolitical faceoff between east and west found the electronics industry being thrust to the battle's front lines, fervently employing the new solid-state technology in increasingly sophisticated defense and weapons systems. Out of urgent military need came technological marvels that kept the United States in the forefront of science, and chief among these was the advent of digital computers.
It was the digital computer advances in the 1950s that laid the groundwork for the successful commercial mainframe and mini computers that would emerge in the 1960s, and later evolve into the personal computers of the 1970s and 1980s. Digital computer technology that had begun as part of the war effort in the forties was refined and then marketed as a commercial product.
In 1957, J.M. Bridges, the Defense Department's Director of Electronics, told a group of computer manufacturers that digital computers were destined to replace less reliable analog machines in complex military weapons systems of the future. A hallmark of the development effort, and a sure means of achieving reliability, would be to manufacture standard, modular digital functional blocks that could be combined with little or no change to build complex computing systems.
Indeed, even as the Korean War began at the outset of the decade, the concept of the plug-in circuit module had taken form and begun to speed the production of electronic equipment. It permitted circuits to be assembled in different areas and then simply connected together. Modularization, combined with a growing reliance on printed circuits, also brought enhanced reliability, repeatability, and easier servicing when things did go awry.
The earliest digital computers, beginning in the forties and continuing into the late 1950s, were based on vacuum tubes. They were unreliable and difficult to program, used lots of power, required very large rooms, and were constantly in need of maintenance. Storing information was difficult, and the machines could only solve one problem at a time.
A breakthrough in digital computing came in 1951, when the Eckert and Mauchly Computer Company of Philadelphia sold the first commercial computer, the UNIVAC 1, to the U.S. Census Bureau. The massive machine retrieved data from memory by transmitting sonic pulses through tubes of mercury. An additional 45 UNIVAC 1 machines would eventually be sold.
Other computer advancements came in memory. For example, the invention of ferrite core memories would lead to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's development of random access memory (RAM), which made retrieving information quick and efficient. Also, the RAMAC disc operating system, introduced by IBM in 1957, was the first data processing system to use record-like discs to store digital data. Each disc had a storage capacity of about 100,000 characters and could be randomly accessed.
Although development of the transistor gave electronic design engineers an important building block for the future, it also spurred development of the tools and infrastructure the industry would require for growth. The 1950s saw a broad array of test and measurement equipment emerge as engineers clamored for ways to quantify the performance of their circuits. As the need for improved test equipment grew, advances in cathode-ray tube (CRT) technology were essential for the equipment to evolve. Improved CRTs were put to good use both in test gear and in television sets.
The 1953 development of the digital voltmeter (DVM) by Non-Linear Systems as a separate instrument was a key innovation in test equipment. The DVM, an instrument that was part of many analog computers, increased the accuracy of typical laboratory measurements by more than an order of magnitude over the vacuum-tube analog voltmeters that had preceded it.
The industry also began looking ahead to how it would produce components in the future. To that end, Bell Labs developed an experimental transistor-making robot that presaged later advances in automated semiconductor manufacturing. The machine, dubbed "Mr. Meticulous," accurately positioned and welded gold collector and emitter wires to their respective device layers and then automatically tested the finished devices.
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