Overview
Early Histories
Other Documents
Book
A History of Computer Communications 1968-1988
Computer History Museum
CHM Home Page
Oral History Archive
A History of Computer Communications 1968-1988
CHM Home Page
Oral History Archive
a.5 The Transistor - 1947
The
transistor was the first of three technological discontinuities to radically
alter the dynamics and structure of the computer market-structure.
[56]
Everyone knew an alternative had to be found to
vacuum tubes if computers were to be made more reliable, faster, smaller, and
consume less power and generate less heat. Driving and funding the search for
an alternative was the military.
A
transistor is a device that accomplishes the two necessary tasks of switching
on-off and amplification. Switching
on-off made possible the conversion of an analog signal, electricity, to the
0's and 1's of a digital signal. Amplification had two purposes: to let a very
small current control a very large one, and to boost signals to overcome
circuit noise so signals with information could be detected. And profoundly
different than a vacuum tube, a transistor worked not by electrons flowing
through voltage gradient, but by channeling them in semiconductor materials.
[57]
But
investigators lacked pure enough materials to create semiconductors. Once again
the government played a major role in pushing theory into practice. During
World War II, the government significantly increased funding of semiconductor
research at Bell Labs, universities and industrial companies, and created MIT
Radiation Laboratory to coordinate the research.
[58]
The war time scientific culture also encouraged
communication and cooperation among all researchers -- an example was a "Meeting
on Germanium Crystals" held at Bell Labs on April 9, 1945 among university
and industrial laboratory scientists.
[59]
Three months later, Bell Labs issued an "Authorization
for Work" to investigate making transistors from solid-state materials.
It
would take over two years, but on December 23, 1947, the first transistor was
demonstrated at Bell Telephone Laboratories. Walter H. Brattain and John
Bardeen, experimentalist and theorist respectively, demonstrated a crude, but
working, amplifying transistor made from germanium and wires. Their
demonstration motivated William B. Shockley to work out the seminal principle
of a solid-state transistor over the following five weeks.
[60]
(For their achievement, all three received the Nobel
Prize.) Public announcement was delayed, however, until later in 1948.
From
public announcement onward, Bell Labs, and thus AT&T, consistently acted to
effect wide disclosure and use of transistor technology. For example, the
military was told only one week before the public announcement to prevent them
from blocking its release on the grounds of national security; they held
seminars in the early 1950's when they shared all they knew about transistor
technology; and in 1952 they licensed the technology to all comers for a
minimum royalty of 5% of sales. Those analyzing Bell Lab's important open
policy conclude Bell Labs knew the transistor was too important to keep to
themselves; knew they had more to gain than lose from wide-spread use; might
have suspected that the government would have forced such a policy in any case,
especially in light of the Justice Department's antitrust case filed in 1949;
and such a policy was consistent with their past practice.
[61]
In AT&T's case, the fact that it was a monopoly
mattered, based on historical practice, but more importantly, it was because
AT&T executives truly saw themselves as a service business. This issue will
be extensively explored in the next chapter.
If
the transistor had been perfected by an organization committed to appropriating
every advantage from its innovation, not in making the innovation "public
property," then the subsequent growth in the semiconductor, and all
related, including computer industries, would certainly have been very
different.
The
transistor was not the only possible alternative to the vacuum tube; and again,
the government funded competitive investigations. Three of the most promising
alternatives were thyratribs (hot filament gas tubes), tronodes (miniature
bi-stable neon gas tubes) and magnetic amplifiers (iron-cored or ferrite-cored
inductors). Magnetic amplifiers were pursued most aggressively by Remington
Rand and subsequently Sperry Rand, although also by IBM, Burroughs, Raytheon
and Logistics Research Corporation. In a press release in 1956, Sperry Rand
hailed their perfection of high-speed magnetic amplifiers, brand named
FERRACTORS, and stated: "The computer opens up an era in which filament
tubes and transistors will be outmoded by devices of this kind."
[62]
The computers introduced by Sperry Rand in 1960
(UNIVAC SS80/90) and 1961 (UNIVAC SS80/90 II) were made with magnetic
amplifiers. Not until December 1961 did Sperry Rand introduce a transistorized
computer (UNIVAC 490), two years after IBM had introduced theirs (IBM 7070).
Sperry Rand's protracted commitment to magnetic amplifiers proved to be a
failed strategy. In their case, it contributed to their continuing inability to
re-establish market leadership.
By
1952, Western Electric (and a few other firms) manufactured approximately
90,000 point-contact transistors, which were sold primarily to the military.
[63]
Data from 1955 to 1960 clearly shows the importance
of government purchases. See Table below. Two important sources of demand were
the early commitment of the Air Force to use semiconductors in the Minuteman
Missile in 1958, and the growth of IBM -- the largest customer of every
semiconductor company. (Note: Table is all devices not just transistors
where the percent government purchases was much higher.)
Government Purchases of
Semiconductor Devices 1955-1960
Year
|
Total
Semiconductor
Shipments
(millions $)
|
Shipments to
Federal
Government
(millions $)
|
Government
Share of Total
Shipments
(percent)
|
1955
|
40
|
15
|
38
|
1956
|
90
|
32
|
36
|
1957
|
151
|
54
|
36
|
1958
|
210
|
81
|
39
|
1959
|
396
|
180
|
45
|
1960
|
542
|
258
|
48
|
In
addition to manufacturing transistors for sale, AT&T's Bell Labs built the
first transistorized computer, the TRADIC, finished in January 1954 and funded
by the Air Force. Bell Labs disclosed TRADIC in a paper presented at a
conference in December 1954.
How did IBM master
transistors? The answer, predictably enough -- with the help of the government,
but with a twist.
In September 1955, IBM lost
out to Remington Rand in the bid to build a super fast computer -- intended to
be 100 times faster than the UNIVAC I -- for the University of California
Radiation Laboratory (UCRL) [now the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory]. By
then Remington Rand was a division of Sperry Rand.
[64]
Code named LARC, Sperry Rand expected to deliver the
computer in February 1958. (It would take until 1960, and $19 million, not the
estimated $2.85 million.
[65]
A key mistake was using magnetic amplifiers -- they
had to redesign again using transistors.)
If LARC was to be the next,
newest, fastest, state-of-the-art computer architecture, an architecture based
on a component other than vacuum tubes -- how could IBM stay competitive if it
also did not invest to learn and master the required technological innovations?
What would be the best computer architecture using transistors? And how well
would it work?
IBM set out to sell a
computer design to be delivered under contract to a competitive government
laboratory, one doing the computationally intensive work of nuclear research,
Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, now known as Los Alamos National Laboratory
(LANL) in New Mexico. A year later, in November 1956, LANL accepted their
proposal. The project would be named STRETCH, meaning to extend the boundaries
of state-of-the-art computing. It was an opportunity to "rethink" and
"redesign" a computer's architecture using transistors, without
needing to be compatible with their existing architectures. The objective: a
computer 100 times more powerful
[66]
than the
704.
Meanwhile,
the first operational transistor computer, the Burroughs Atlas Mod 1-J1
Guidance Computer built for the Air Force, had been delivered in April 1955,
although not operational until September 1957. The first available commercial
transistor computer was the General Electric 210 in June 1959. IBM announced
theirs, the 7070, in September 1958; RCA, theirs, the 501, in December 1958.
The
market-structure of First Generation mainframe computers (1950-1959) consisted
of only seven companies and 31 computer models. Other companies developed
computers, but they did not sell them commercially. Research and development
funding came almost entirely from the U. S. Government. Over 100 computers were
"completed on an experimental or contract basis for special uses."
[67]
Although a commercial computer market existed, it
was far from clear what its economic potential might be.
The
transistor, as a technological discontinuity, as the economist Joesph
Schumpeter might describe it
[68]
, would strike "not at the margins of the
profits and the outputs of the existing firms, but at their foundations and
their very lives."
[69]
In the case of transistors, once firms started
making computers with transistors, they never again used vacuum tubes.
[56] The assumption of three technological discontinuities is not an assertion that there were only three discontinuities, only that for the purposes of the present argument, three are sufficient to explain the central economic dynamics of computers.
[57] See Ibid. for an excellent discussion of semiconductor technologies and developments.
[58] Ibid., p. 199
[59] Crystals were critical to both radar and computers. To computers they became the clock, the system signal that synchronizes actions.
[60] T. R. Reid, "The Chip," Simon and Schuster 1984, p. 43-53
[61] See Nelson
[62] Nelson, p. 195
[63] Ibid., p. 59
[64] The merger created internal organizational conditions that would cause it to be both slow and wrong in its actions. Fortune article citation.
[65] Ibid., p. 188 (87)
[66] Ibid., p. 189
[67] Ibid., p.179
[68] Only Schumpeter saw "a decisive cost or quality advantage," not technology as cause.
[69] Schumpeter, 1942: 84