Hacker News Reader

Comment by akeck | Hacker News Reader

Would it be fair to call the past 5-7 decades the "Silicon Age" or the "Transistor Age"?

I mean transistors are neat and all, but what really sets things apart for me is integrated circuits. When you look at the size of the discrete MOnSter 6502 CPU[1], featured here[2] recently, and realize it has around 3k transistors and the latest CPUs and GPUs have several billion...

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

The real driving force for about the last 40 years--starting with PCs, then larger systems, and eventually almost everything--was integrated circuits using CMOS technology. CMOS process shrinks have been an incredible lever. Not the only one of course but a major one. The transistor itself was an incredibly important inventions of course but it's the ability to pack so many of them economically into a very small amount of space that really delivered on its promise.

I think the transistor age would make more sense, it allows the age to cover a broader stretch of history. Think about things like the stone/bronze/iron ages, it's not any one new tool but the base technology itself. So if silicon gets supplanted I don't think we will stop using transistors.

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

If you're going for a modern version of "Ages of Humanity" akin to Hesiod/Ovid, sure, if not Digital or Information.

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.

Historians have been calling it the Information Age. Transistors is just gating or amplifying information over electricity.

The IBM 1401 was the most popular computer of the early 1960s, with over 10,000 produced. It was built from germanium (not silicon) transistors. So silicon shouldn't get all the credit.

I wrote a lot of 1401 code in the 60's at UCLA including a 1401 assembler (5 x faster than IBM's), a floating point package, and an assembler for the historic SWAC there. It was a lot of fun.

If you blogged about it, we would all read it.

Transistor, information, or automation could be good I think. Another option maybe — what really distinguishes our civilization right now is that we’ve integrated out economies around the entire planet, so “global age” might be a good candidate.

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.

“Silicon Age” is being used, though “Information Age” and “Digital Age” are more common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Age

Transistors made of non-silicon materials have existed for a long time.

No, I think the concept of ages is itself a historiographic fiction that peaked in the 20th century, as an attempt to impose order and narrative on the unstructured chaos of history. But they are one-dimensional, westcentric, and IMHO obsolete.

Historians of the future will probably refer to the dot-com bubble as the start of the Silicon Age. But another take could be that the silicon and transistor age started at the same time with commercial silicon transistors (mid 50s).

Historians lump ever longer stretches of time together the further into the past stuff becomes. I suspect they will start pre WWII with mechanical calculators or focus on computer networks as the defining moment.

Computational, analytical, scientific, or something like that, maybe?

Only time will tell, but at least for now it seems like either will work for the next few thousand years. Iron is still important, and Bronze is still used, but Silicon seems the like backbone of our civilization now.

For the next few thousand years? I sure wouldn't make a prediction about what technology is going to be important with a time horizon that long. Vacuum tubes are barely a century old.

SI (in our ceramics) has been a popular construction and pottery material forever, pottery shards are, after all, one of the main ways that we distinguish which ancient cultures were spreading where. The problem with “Silicon age” is that use of lots of silicon is not a distinguishing factor for an age, haha.

Let's reserve the term "Silicon Age" for when they take over.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com