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The first transistor was built at Bell Labs on 16 December 1947, replacing vacuum tubes and making miniaturised electronics possible.

Bell Labs

TechnologyHistory

Why it matters

The idea in context

On 16 December 1947 Bell Labs built the first transistor — a tiny switch that replaced bulky vacuum tubes and made possible every computer and phone that followed.

Türkçe

Aynı kart, başka bir dilde.

İlk transistör 16 Aralık 1947'de Bell Labs'te yapıldı; vakum tüplerinin yerini alarak minyatür elektroniği mümkün kıldı.
Bell Labs

16 Aralık 1947'de Bell Labs ilk transistörü yaptı — hantal vakum tüplerinin yerini alan ve ardından gelen her bilgisayar ile telefonu mümkün kılan minik bir anahtar.

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Background reading: TransistorAttribution and context are revised when stronger evidence appears. Corrections are welcome through the editorial page.
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The Apollo Guidance Computer flew astronauts to the Moon with about 4 KB of working memory — your phone has roughly a million times more.

The AGC had about 4 KB of RAM, 72 KB of fixed 'rope core' memory, and ran at roughly 1 MHz — less computing power than a musical greeting card. Yet in 1969 it steered Apollo 11 across 380,000 km, ran the landing radar, and even recovered gracefully from overload alarms minutes before touchdown. The story is not about weak hardware; it is about what disciplined engineering, compact code and ruthless prioritising can do under impossible constraints.

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Next in the open archiveMoore's Law, proposed by Gordon Moore in 1965, observed that transistor density on chips roughly doubled every two years — a pattern that held for decades.Q0444