A microchip such as this one, perched on a person’s fingernail, has far more computing power than early computers such as ENIAC.
electricity to make it work. Computers made of transistors could be crammed into much smaller packages. The transistor had an even greater advantage. Its basic principle was that it could control pulses of electricity. The pulses in a digital computer didn’t need to carry a lot of power, so a transistor didn’t have to be large. Manufacturers developed techniques to build smaller and smaller transistors. Meanwhile, a British electronics engineer named Geoffrey Dummer came up with a radical idea in 1952: Why not build an entire circuit on one solid crystal? It was a tremendous idea, although Dummer wasn’t actually able to build his invention. However, by the late 1950s, manufac60
Great Inventions of the 20th Century