What was the impact of the invention of transistors, microchips and microprocessors on society?
Simple logic circuits can be made with resistors and diodes, but for complicated circuits one needs an amplifying component. Which generally means valves or transistors. • Thermionic valves are much bigger than transistors. The volume of a valve varies from several ml to litres. They are usually expensive and unreliable compared to transistors. Part of their unreliability was due to temperature: to eject electrons, the electrodes had to be heated, and thermal deterioration is difficult to avoid. Another part was due to the need to maintain a vacuum, usually inside a glass capsule sealed to a metal base. (Large size, cost and the need to replace from time to time is not such a problem in very high power applications, and so valves still have uses in such things as radio transmitters.) Computers (Univac, CSIRAC etc) using thermionic valves were very large, slow, expensive and unreliable by modern standards. (The distortion produced by valve amplifiers is different to that prodcued by tra
