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Morris Tanenbaum, inventor of the silicon transistor, has died

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: Morris Tanenbaum, inventor of the silicon transistor, has died

#71

Post by Fatnino »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #27
dakial1 wrote: post #23

"Despite Tanenbaum’s early work on silicon transistors, AT&T did not support further research or advancement of the technology. At the time, Bell Labs was the research arm of AT&T. Although Bell Labs had “a significant technological lead in silicon transistor technology, it stopped doing proper research in the field—partly because it just wasn’t immediately relevant to AT&T’s business—so silicon transistor technology…

> so silicon transistor technology, including the integrated circuit, was done by Intel and Texas Instruments instead Right. Tanenbaum invented the silicon transistor (which of course was a major accomplishment -- definitely worthy of honor), but what most people think of as a "microchip" (i.e., an integrated circuit with multiple components on the same piece of semiconductor) was invented almost simultaneously by Ja…

I daily drive past the spot where Fairchild was at the time. It's next to the cheapest gas station in Palo Alto (not really saying much) and across the street from the location that used to be Sun's HQ before they moved to where Facebook is now.

Re: Morris Tanenbaum, inventor of the silicon transistor, has died

#72

Post by irjustin »

throwaway173738 wrote: post #67
djmips wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still walk into a store and buy one transistor but you can't buy one storage bit. Not sure if that is an argument but interesting.

A toggle switch is one bit.

A register is one bit as well but you can't buy it in magnetic format

Re: Morris Tanenbaum, inventor of the silicon transistor, has died

#74

Post by smaddox »

irjustin wrote: post #61
colordrops wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about bits on drive platters? Do they count as individually manufactured units?

I'll be the first to admit this is a meaningless debate but seems fun! I'll say no We don't colloquial think of a HDD bit as a manufactured unit on magnetic disks. It doesn't have a direct macro connection/object. For SSDs the macro analog of a bit storage is a register and those are like 6 nand gates which those are made of like 3 transistors? Exact numbers are wrong I'm sure. It's been a long time.

I'm not so sure. Last time I followed the field, modern HDDs were nanostructured, such that each magnetic domain was literally a physically distinguishable object, in a sense. I'm not sure if that's still the case, and I'm also not 100% sure that ever made it in to production, but I'm pretty sure it did.

Re: Morris Tanenbaum, inventor of the silicon transistor, has died

#75

Post by smaddox »

djmips wrote: post #63
colordrops wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about bits on drive platters? Do they count as individually manufactured units?

You can still walk into a store and buy one transistor but you can't buy one storage bit. Not sure if that is an argument but interesting.

Flip flops existed before transistors.

Re: Morris Tanenbaum, inventor of the silicon transistor, has died

#76

Post by smaddox »

cubefox wrote: post #10
woodruffw wrote: post #6

It's incredibly humbling to be reminded how young this field of our is: this site and everything its presence implies (about the Internet, global communication, computers) would not exist were it not for the work of a very-recently-deceased engineer. Very few other fields (aerospace and modern pharmacology, among them) can say the same thing.

It is interesting to think about about alternative history here: If microchip technology had never been invented for some reason, what would we have developed instead? What is the next best computing technology?

Interesting hypothetical. If semiconductors were never discovered, I suspect we would have kept shrinking vacuum tubes, eventually down to the point (which has now been demonstrated) that atmospheric pressure is sufficiently low pressure to operate at.

Re: Morris Tanenbaum, inventor of the silicon transistor, has died

#78

Post by bnegreve »

hovden wrote: post #68
intrasight wrote: post #54

I went looking for a recent estimate of the number of transistors that have been manufactured. It appears to be in the range of 10^23. I'm pretty sure there in nothing else anyone has invented that has been replicated in such volume.

Interesting. Do you have a source? How does it compare to other tech, like nails? Or cups? Shoes?

Be careful with large numbers: 10^23 shoes would be roughly 854B shoes for every (~117B) human that have ever lived, that is about 14 million pairs of shoes per individual and per day. I am pretty sure there has never been a market for that many shoes.

Re: Morris Tanenbaum, inventor of the silicon transistor, has died

#79

Post by newswasboring »

supernova87a wrote: post #26
cubefox wrote: post #7

I'm embarrassed to admit that this is the first time I hear of him.

Agreed, odd that the name just is not in the same group of people as Moore, Fairchild, Noyce, etc? This is the first I had heard the name.

This is the same fallacy as when people say Europe doesn't contribute to tech industry because they don't have huge software companies. All the software companies progress on the back of several asian and European companies. Most semiconductor manufacturing equipment is made either by European companies (ASML, Zeiss etc.), or by asian companies (TEL, TSMC, Gigaphoton etc.) This is why ASML till a few years ago used to bill itself as "the most important company you have never heard of".
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