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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

I think we would have ended up here anyways: to assume that the silicon transistor would not have been invented without Morris Tanenbaum is to succumb to the Great Man theory[1].

The reality is that Morris was a brilliant man whose life intersected in the right place and time with the arc of history; we should celebrate his life and contributions for that, and not because we think that we'd be stuck in 1950 without them.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory

Not sure but I think the question is more like "what if physics didn't allow transistors?" rather than if one guy didn't invent them. What's the next best thing, and how far would we have pushed it?

If transistors would not be possible, then lots of other stuff would not exist, like solar panels or digital cameras. Handy electricity conversion, etc.

I think alternativly we would have miniaturized vacuum tubes much more, the ones that powered computers before transistors (and made them huge)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum-tube_computer

Surprising to me - size reduced vacuum tubes happened and it's still being worked on in as I understand it. There are some quite miniature working vacuum tubes - if you search you'll find more information.

They have the big advantage, that they are not sensitive to radiation, like transistors are.

> what if physics didn't allow transistors?"

Yes, because technology is discovered more than invented, this is a more interesting question. What are some others?

What if biology didn't allow anesthetics? Or antibiotics?

What if geology hadn't split up Pangea?

Is there life because of a hospitable environment, or does a hospitable environment exist because of life?

Just a quick list. I'm sure readers can add.

Inventions often seem to be simultaneous, as if the time had come for this problem to be recognized, and for the solution to be possible. However, I do think in some cases, a "great man" can make an invention earlier than otherwise - we should measure genius in units of time.

We wouldn't be stuck in 1950 without him... but maybe we'd now be in 2018 without him.

OTOH the "great man" fallacy encourages the intense and unpredictable work required for many inventions - why undermine that?

You are correct. If I recollect the electric bulb had at least 10 inventors. In fact one of them was an Englishman who had patented it 2 years in England before Thomas Edison had patented it in America.

The radio transmission/reception had two other inventors other than Marconi.

Vacuum tubes was the thing, I'd imagine there would be more of that.

That, or mentats.

Mentats would be cool, but don't think it's possible until after the butlerian revolution. Before then computers are just easier

This is something the Russians worked on,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_integrator

I've been told analogue computers got pretty far too,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer

The Computer History Museum has a surprisingly large exhibit on these if you ever get to visit:

https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/analog-computers/...

It's pretty fascinating, and a great example of working within the limitations of hardware at the time.

Possibilities:

Mems vacuum tubes.

Nano electromechanical relays: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanoelectromechanical_relay

I don't think anyone has ever explored an alternative here. Transistors came out of exploratory research that Bell Labs funded and as the other comments say, this indeed happened very recently! I suppose the silicon industry and the digital age built up so fast that we didn't really have the incentive to explore the alternative?

Nowadays, people think of just vacuum tubes and then transistors, but in the 1960s there were a lot of different technologies being used. For example, superconducting cryotrons, magnetic core logic, parametric-phase-locked-oscillator logic, microwave logic, electroluminescent-photoconductor logic, and tunnel diodes. If transistors didn't pan out, there were lots of other technologies that could have taken over. Magnetic core logic (not to be confused with magnetic core storage) in particular was used in several computers and seemed poised for success until advances in transistors killed it off.

More: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-vacuum-tubes-forgotten-rival

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.

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