In 1959 computers became smaller due to a device called a transistor, which was invented in Bell Labs by J. Bardeen, H.W. Brattain, and W. Shockley. They got a nobel prize for their invention which revolutionized the way computers were made and what they could do. They replaced the vacuum tubes, and were a lot better because of the fact that they were small, used little energy, and were much faster than their predecessors. Vacuum tubes and transisters are used as switches in a computer, which in mass represent the conditional abilities of a computer; that is, the ability of a computer to make decisions based on stored information, which is the nature of a true computer by today's standards.