The Integrated Circuit

The first transistor was developed in 1947, leading from the limitations of early computers. The 1890 US census was expected to take 10 years to condense and correlate by manual tabulation. This length of time was unacceptable and so the US Census Bureau sponsored a contest for a new method of processing the data. This led to the invention of the mechanical tabulating machine that processed the census data in 6 weeks. The person who invented this machine, Hermon Hollerith, went on to form the tabulating machine company, which eventually evoled into the International Business Machines(IBM) corporation. The tabulating machine was one of the earliest computers and the technology of computers continued to progress in the 1930s with the devolpment of computers using electromagnetic switches. During the second World War, intelligent and fast machines to crack secret codes were developed, and a result was the world's first electronic computer, the Electronic Numeric Integrator and calculator (ENIAC). ENIAC was gigantic, heavy and expensive, having numerous parts, needing large amounts of energy, and producing large quantities of heat. However, the crude ENIAC gave birth to the electronics era. The revolution it launched led to the end of the industrial age and the dawn of the information age in the mid 1970s. Along the way, the ENIAC was shrunk and in the 70s, the entire electronics of the ENIAC was duplicated on a 0.375 square inch piece of silicon, drawing less power than a light bulb and costing less than $20! It is now called the microchip.

The finished processors being inspected.