The next major step for the computer was making it electronic. Early electronic computers used vacuum tubes and were the size of rooms. The vacuum tubes often blew up, and spares were expensive and difficult to install. When the transistor came along these room sized monsters could be shrunk into 1/10th of the space, but they were still large and radiated a lot of heat.

The microchip, pioneered by Intel and others, really enabled the new "Information Economy". Today computers are over 10,000 times more powerful than the room sized computers of the 40's and half of the worlds computers are linked together in a massive computer information network called the Internet.