These are a few knick-knacks I have sitting on my bookshelf. I keep them there because they help me reflect on how astonishing the computers that sit on our desks our. These three pieces, when put in proper perspective, is just short of the absurd.
Exhibit A is a vacuum tube. This particular one I believe is from an old television set. Until 1947, this was the electronic basis for mass communication. They were the heart of radios, televisions, and the first electronic computers. Generally, the ENIAC is thought of as the first of these electronic computers. At 8 1/3 feet by 3 feet by 80 feet, this giant computer held 17,468 vacuum tubes.
Within a year, the vacuum tube is made obsolete with Exhibit B. Exhibit B is a basic transistor. For a fraction of the size, materials, and cost it takes over all the functionality of the previous vacuum tube. With as small as Exhibit B is, what you see in the diagram is mostly just plastic. The microscopic core at the components center is where the actual transistor sits. And as the years progress and manufacturing techniques improve, transistors continue to get smaller and smaller at a consistent rate. They quickly became small enough that we could fit the equivalent of the ENIAC on a single microchip.
By 1965, Gordon E. Moore, co-founder of Intel, had taken noticed of how quickly transistors were shrinking. He postulated that the transistor will continue to shrink so predictably that quantity of transistors on a processor will double every two years. So far he has be complete correct. Exhibit C shows the original Intel Pentium processor that was released in 1993. At this point we have 3.1 Million transistors. Despite the appearances, these 3.1 million transistors is not spread out over the entire 2 inch ceramic plate that is shown. If we were to look at the inside of the processor, the 3.1 million transistors have been fit on a flat piece of silicon, no larger than a dime.
Now 15 years after the release of the Pentium, Moore’s law is still valid with no sign of slowing down. Today’s microprocessors have as many transistors as there are people on this planet. So to truly appreciate the wonderful machine sitting on your desk allowing you to read this article, I ask you to take a moment to try to imagine it in proper context. Picture your computer with vacuum tubes instead of transistors. The equivalent machine would be a metal box sizing nearly 8.4 square miles in size.
