Transistors are civilization’s invisible infrastructure

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/authorinterviews/10...

Yeah but the magic happens mostly behind a flat surface that we call a screen.

Today its kind of boring to most people (not me obviously) but imagine how magical it was upon discovery and propagation. A common need in industry is to turn a shaft which we now do with electric motors. Prior to the motor the only installable, on-demand source of rotational power was a steam engine. It had lots of moving parts, required a boiler, and fuel source that was either coal or wood and had to be carted in by horse. Then you had to hire skilled and trained operators to maintain the engines and the boilers.

With electric all you do is connect two or three wires to a hunk of iron and copper and a shaft supported by two bearings spins. Just make sure the bearings are oiled, brushes (DC motors were once common) are in proper order, and you're good to go. There is no dangerous combustion or flue gas, pipes, or burn hazards, no fuel storage or hazards, no bulky boiler and no need for boilermen. In an instant an invisible force is pushing the shaft around who's only wear items are serviceable bearings. If you needed light to see the machines these motors operated just connect two wires to a glass sphere which emitted a bright illuminating glow. That's magic.

Now thanks to modern high power transistors and smaller faster transistors in microchips we can tame this magical force much more accurately and cheaply enabling electric cars, led lighting, solar and renewables, high efficiency switching power supplies, and so much more.

All this thanks to the magical invisible force of electricity and electromagnetism tamed by our equally magical semiconducting devices. The modern world is literally moved by these devices.

I consider wireless to be black magic which is also enabled by really fast transistors.

But who knows with quantum photonics, maybe laser/optic circuits will supplant a large chunk of silicon transistors in the next 100 years

And not just transistors, but analog circuits as well, allowing for extremely compact designs.

[1]: https://monster6502.com/

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33841901

Silicon is present in sand, so we’ve been using it forever in ceramics, on some level. Like copper, it has been a good friend to humanity for a very long time. The only problem is that “using lots of SI” is not a distinguishing characteristic for an age!

We call it the Iron Age because iron is a grumpy, unfriendly element that didn’t want to help out until we got some pretty fancy forges.

Maybe we could use it to mark some larger scales. Silicon age could start around 25k years ago with the invention of pottery. Before that, I dunno, fire age or rock age.

But Stone/Copper/Bronze/Iron refer specifically to the dominant material for crafting weaponry. In that sense, maybe we're in the transition between Steel and Plastic, though maybe a case could be made for Lead.

Or we really are in the Nuclear Age, and it becomes the Final Age of Humanity.

Or war has gone digital, and we are in the Information Age, beyond terrestrial materials. In that case, true Space and then Atomic (universal assembler) Ages may follow.

You can make an analog computer from just about anything, it's a matter of identifying things you can interpret as flows and stores (or, as the professors who taught control systems at my uni, faucets, drains and bathtubs), and arranging them just right. You can make a digital computer from just about anything too - it's a matter of identifying things you can interpret as a NAND gate, and stacking them just right. You can encode a neural network model as grooves in plastic sheets, stack them into layers, and have it naturally process incoming light. Etc. The possibilities are limitless, because computing is more about your mental model, and less about the substrate itself.

So I imagine, the breakthrough for nanotech will be when someone figures out a way to make some kind of programmable computer that works at nanoscale, can be easily produced, and is somewhat robust against the environment. It doesn't need to be a fast computer - we're used to multi-GHz CPUs and multi-MHz microcontrollers, but at nanoscale, even an equivalent of an old 8008 will do, or even something much weaker: single nanobot doesn't need much compute. You'll be deploying them by thousands or millions at a time anyway, and you'll want to program them as a swarm anyway.

"It is a strange fate we should suffer so much fear and doubt… over so small a thing. Such a little thing."

Where the little thing here is the transistor.