The evolution of electronic device miniaturization

© Mark Ollig

The dawn of pocket-sized radios came into prominence due to the invention of the small, cylindrical electronic component called a transistor.

“My first transistor radio. First time ever I held a gadget in my hand. I loved what it could do. It brought me music, it opened up my world. I looked at my little radio and it had six transistors in it,” Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak said in 2010.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said, “Without the invention of the transistor, I’m quite sure that the PC would not exist as we know it today.”

Back in 1946, vacuum tubes were used in the electrical devices of the day. But, unfortunately, they were large and not suitable for small, portable devices. In addition, the glass vacuum tubes were expensive, fragile, used a lot of electricity, gave off a great deal of heat, were prone to recurrent failures, and regularly needed replacement.

At Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, scientist John Bardeen and physicist Walter Brattain developed a small electronic device Dec. 16, 1947, later called a point-contact transistor, using a silicon semiconductor, tiny wires, and a thin metal plate.

Further adjustments included attaching two small metal electrodes into each end of a slice of germanium (instead of silicon) one-half an inch long. Next, they used a thin strip of gold foil wrapped around a plastic triangle with a gap in the foil just above the middle of the germanium.

After applying a voltage, the screen on their oscilloscope showed the electrical power output through the piece of germanium was 100 times stronger than what went in. Thus, their invention was the first solid-state transistor using three electrical leads known as the emitter, the collector, and the base. As a result, the transistor could amplify and control the electrical signals going through it.

Bardeen, Brattain, and physicist William Shockley completed the invention of the transistor Dec. 23, 1947.

Credit for the name, transistor, comes from Bell Lab’s electrical engineer John R. Pierce, who came up with the word in May 1948.

“The way I provided the name was to think of what the device did. And at that time, it was supposed to be the dual of the vacuum tube. The vacuum tube had transconductance, and so the transistor would have transresistance. And the name should fit in with the names of other devices, such as varistor and thermistor. So I suggested the name transistor,” Pierce said during a 1999 interview for PBS.

The world learned of the transistor when announced during a press conference June 30, 1948.

US Patent 2,524,035 for Three-electrode Circuit Element Utilizing Semiconductive Materials (transistor) was granted Oct. 3, 1950, to John Bardeen et al. (and others). You can see it at https://bit.ly/3nmtglg.

By 1952, the transistor was being used in Bell Telephone equipment.

The Indianapolis News newspaper ran an article Oct. 18, 1954, about a local company that would begin manufacturing “the first pocket-sized transistor radio using the amazing transistor instead of conventional vacuum tubes.”

“We are particularly proud to announce production of the new Regency transistor radio at this time,” the article quoted Edward C. Tudor, president of Industrial Development Engineering Associates (IDEA) located in Indianapolis, IN.

The Regency transistor radio was designed and developed by Texas Instruments, Inc., which began operations in 1951 out of Dallas, TX.

Regency, a division of IDEA, commenced manufacturing the transistor radio just in time for the holidays.

The newspaper article described the new Regency TR-1 radio as “slightly larger than a pack of king-size cigarettes.” It weighs 12 ounces, is 5 inches tall, 32 inches wide, and 1.25 inches thick.

The Regency transistor radio uses a flat, round 22.5-volt carbon-zinc battery to provide power for 20 hours of use.

Public newspaper advertisements in November 1954 for the first commercial transistor radio, the Regency TR-1, began. It sold for $49.95 ($509.36 in today’s dollars) and came in four colors; black, bone white, cloud gray, and mandarin red. Later colors added included mahogany and forest green. Some models were manufactured using clear plastic cases.

In 1956, Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley won the Nobel Prize in physics “for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect.”

PBS aired the documentary, “Transistorized!” hosted by Ira Flatow, Sept. 1, 1999. It can be seen using this link: https://to.pbs.org/3vIaOam.

A 1955 film documentary shows Regency TR-1 transistor radios assembled at the IDEA Regency manufacturing plant. You can watch it at https://bit.ly/3b60bVs.

Walter H. Brattain earned a Ph. D from the University of Minnesota in 1929. He passed away Oct. 13, 1987, at age 85.

In 1963, William B. Shockley was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science from Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, MN. He passed away Aug. 12, 1989, at age 79.

John Bardeen worked as a theoretical physicist at the University of Minnesota until World War II began. He died Jan. 30, 1991, age 82.

John R. Pierce died April 2, 2002, at the age of 92.

The transistor is responsible for the evolution of electronic device miniaturization, and is perhaps the most important invention of the 20th century.

Regency TR-1 with cover removed

Regency TR-1 (1954)

To boldly go and make some history

© Mark Ollig

It was mid-morning, Oct. 13. William Shatner, the actor who famously portrayed Captain James T. Kirk on the iconic science fiction television series “Star Trek,” had just landed in a spacecraft with three others after visiting the final frontier of space.

“Everybody in the world needs to do this,” a visibly emotional Shatner said after emerging from the space capsule named RSS (Reusable Space Ship) First Step.

First Step was manufactured by the Blue Origin Aerospace company, founded in 2000 by billionaire and American entrepreneur Jeff Bezos, who started Amazon in 1994.

The Blue Origin New Shepard rocket system is named after the first American to go into space, astronaut Alan Shepard.

This rocket system includes a suborbital space capsule built with multiple layers of redundancy and is fully autonomous – there are no pilots to fly it; every person on board is a passenger.

The First Step space capsule is dome-shaped, 10 feet high by 12.5 feet wide, and can seat six passengers, with each having a 3.5-foot-by-2.3-foot window to look through.

During the late 1960s, I was one of the millions watching a weekly science fiction television series with Captain Kirk and his crew aboard a starship called the USS Enterprise, traveling at warp speeds throughout the galaxy.

The original television series, “Star Trek,” lasted from 1966 to 1969, ending the same year NASA sent astronauts into space on a mission to land and walk on the moon.

Here we are, 52 years later, and we find Shatner, most notably known for his role as a science fiction space traveler, really becoming one.

Before their flight into space, the four passengers, William Shatner, Chris Boshuizen, Glen De Vries, and Audrey Powers, were required to pass medical tests.

The tests included running down the stairs of the metal gantry, next to the rocket taking them into space.

All four, including the spry and age-defying 90-year-old Shatner, completed their medical tests successfully.

The morning of Oct. 13, Shatner and the three other passengers were seated aboard the Blue Origin RSS First Step pressurized space capsule attached atop the 60-foot-tall NS-18 (New Shepard 18) single-stage rocket.

Millions from around the world anxiously watched as the countdown commenced.

At 9:49 a.m. CST, the rocket blasted off from the Blue Origin Launch Site One complex located outside the west Texas town of Van Horn.

The NS-18 rocket traveled from the Earth at 2,235 mph (a bit less than warp speed). As a result, Shatner and the others aboard the space capsule experienced 5 Gs of gravitational force pulling against them as they propelled upward.

The Karman Line is a boundary a little more than 62 miles above the Earth and is agreed by many aeronautic organizations to be the beginning of space.

The pressurized space capsule separated from the rocket booster before soaring to nearly 66.5 miles above our planet.

Shatner and the other passengers were now in space. With zero Gs, they experienced weightlessness for three minutes.

Shatner, looking out his window at the blueness of the Earth and the darkness of space, exclaimed, “Oh, wow!”

Upon re-entering the lower Earth atmosphere, the parachutes of the space capsule opened, causing it to slowly descend and land safely on the desert ground in Culberson County, TX, near Van Horn.

The entire trip to and from space officially lasted 10 minutes 17 seconds.

“To see the blue color whip by and now you’re staring into blackness, that’s the thing. The covering of blue, this sheath, this blanket, this comforter of blue that we have around, we say, ‘Oh, that’s blue sky.’ And then suddenly you shoot through it all, and you’re looking into blackness,” described a deep-in-thought Shatner, reflecting upon his experience in space after returning to Earth.

He said these words during an emotional description of how he felt looking down at the comforting Earth and then out into the startling blackness of space.

And then, becoming teary-eyed, Shatner exclaimed: “I’m so filled with emotion with what just happened. It’s extraordinary. I hope I never recover from this. I am overwhelmed. I had no idea. It would be so very important for everybody to have that experience.”

When later asked by the press what made him so emotional upon his return to Earth, Shatner paused for a moment and said, “The absolute startling, unexpected difference between the darkness of space and the blue of Earth. Just know that out there lies coldness; yes, the mysteries of space, but right here lies sustenance, life, and nurturing.”

Shatner, who inspired generations by playing a captain on a science fiction television series that led many people to join NASA and civilian space programs, now has his name added to the list of those who have been in space.

Aside from being an actor, he is now an astronaut.

The three-hour replay of Shatner and his fellow passengers’ flight into space can be seen on the Blue Origin YouTube channel using this shortened link: https://bit.ly/3p8RqSO.

The record for being the oldest person to fly in space now belongs to William Shatner, who achieved this historical feat at 90 years, six months, and 22 days old.

Well done, Mr. Shatner. If Leonard Nimoy were here, he would probably smile, arch his eyebrow, and say, “Fascinating.”

Here we are, 55 years later, and we find William Shatner,
most notably known for his role as a science fiction
space traveler, really becoming one.

The Internet Archive: a digital library of everything

© Mark Ollig

“The month is October, the air is turning cold. The leaves are all changing, to red and to gold,” is the beginning of an anonymously written poem befitting the current month.

March 1989, engineer and computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee wrote a paper titled “Information Management: A Proposal” for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known as CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland.

The same year, he finished developing and testing the first hyperlinked web computer server.

He coded the first web page editor and web browser software program and named it the WorldWideWeb.app.

In 1990, CERN researchers and scientists began using Berners-Lee's web platform application over their networked computers.

The following year, Tim Berners-Lee’s web software was released to the entire internet community, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Today’s choice of web browsers includes familiar names such as Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Microsoft Edge, and Internet Explorer. There are many others, as well.

In January 1993, at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), one of the first popular web browsers created was NCSA Mosaic.

A year later, Netscape Communications, based in California, developed a web browser called Netscape Navigator, which soared in popularity and became widely used among internet web surfers during the 1990s.

Netscape Navigator is the forefather of today’s Mozilla Firefox web browser.

Microsoft brought Internet Explorer (which it purchased from Spyglass, Inc.) to the World Wide Web table in 1995.

A few years earlier, in December 1992, Apple’s Macintosh computer began using a web browser called MacWWW, or Samba. This web browser worked with their Classic Mac OS (operating system).

Of course, in 1992, the World Wide Web was just getting started.

In 1996, the Internet Archive website was founded. It began digitally storing and preserving the growing number of web pages and data from the internet.

This organization began with a mission to preserve past and current internet web pages so future generations could look back and see content as originally presented.

“The Internet Archive is working to prevent the Internet – a new medium with major historical significance – and other “born-digital” materials from disappearing into the past,” reads their 1996 mission statement.

Each day, the Internet Archive collects, organizes, catalogs, and preserves web content from numerous websites on the internet.

The Internet Archive is a 501(c) (3) non-profit organization supported by donations.

This organization preserves and stores digital records for future generations and offers historians, students, researchers, and you and me access to thousands of digitally-saved historical collections.

These freely accessible collections contain a treasure trove of photographs, books, movies, music, audio files, software, educational and historical references, and archived internet web pages.

I think of the Internet Archive as a “digital web time capsule.”

Looking back at those early websites, I am reminded of how easy-to-read and uncluttered a web page looked 20 years ago.

I recall a 1960s television cartoon featuring a boy named Sherman and an intelligent talking dog named Mr. Peabody, using a time machine to participate in historical events.

This cartoon used a clever and entertaining approach to teaching children history using the WABAC Machine, pronounced Wayback Machine.

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine currently holds more than 476 billion web pages.

I recently used it to look at the front page of my hometown city’s website as it appeared Dec. 1, 1998. Check it out using this link: https://bit.ly/3v1KE2a. 

One of the links from 1998, Community Info, takes you to the Winsted, Minnesota Community Guide information as it appeared on Dec. 3; here is the link: https://bit.ly/3DrYca8.

Anyone can send data to be archived and searchable by the public on the Internet Archive.

 

To begin uploading videos, text, audio, or images you wish to be saved for future generations; first, obtain your Internet Archive virtual library card at http://bit.ly/2gxWGJV.

Check out the Internet Archive and Wayback Machine to view books, movies, audio, images, software, and web pages at https://archive.org.

In 2000, the Internet Archive began storing television news and related media at https://archive.org/details/tv.

As of October, an estimated 1.7 billion websites exist on the planet and are accessible by 4.6 billion people (and artificially intelligent devices) using the internet.

Currently, the Internet Archive holds more than 70 petabytes (70 million gigabytes) of data.

The “Top Collections at the Archive” can be seen at http://bit.ly/Z523GP.

The following quote was written by Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, on its 25th anniversary.

“By building a Library of Everything in the digital age, I thought the opportunity was not just to make it available to everybody in the world, but to make it better – smarter than paper. By using computers, we could make the Library not just searchable, but organizable.”

What information will the Internet Archive have waiting for future researchers in 2046? 

Stay tuned.

My 1997 article about the City of Winsted's first Web Page
which is shown below:

NASA launched 63 years ago

© Mark Ollig

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) officially opened its doors Oct. 1, 1958.

NASA became a combination of its predecessor US civilian space program, the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA), and other government programs.

Oct. 2, 1958, Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper quoted NASA’s first Administrator, Thomas Keith Glennan, who said, “We have to get up there to learn things we can’t learn from where we are now sitting.”

While the US christened NASA, the country was still talking about Oct. 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union launched the world’s first artificial space satellite named Sputnik.

Around the world, people became fixated on listening through their radios and televisions to the steady radio signal pattern of the “beep-beep-beep-beep ” radio signal transmitted from the Earth-orbiting Sputnik antennas at the 20.005 and 40.002 MHz frequency bands.

Aug. 17, 1958, would be NASA’s first attempt to visit our closest celestial neighbor, the moon, with a spacecraft named Able 1.

This spacecraft was destroyed when the first stage of the Thor rocket it sat atop exploded 77 seconds after launch when it reached 10 miles in altitude.

Less than two months later, Oct. 11, 1958, NASA launched Able 2, later called Pioneer 1.

This spacecraft, not designed to land on the moon, would instead go into lunar orbit, take photographic images of its surface, and transmit them back to Earth.

A laminated plastic shell casing surrounds the 84-pound Pioneer 1, and a thin cylindrical midsection with a short cone is on each side of the spacecraft. The cylinder is 2.4 feet in diameter, and the height from the top of one cone to the top of the opposite cone is 2.5 feet.

Eight low-thrust solid propellant velocity adjustment rockets connect on the end of the upper cone of Pioneer 1 in what is called a ring assembly.

Instruments aboard the Pioneer 1 spacecraft include an ion chamber, magnetometer, temperature sensors, and a micrometeoroid detector. In addition, an attached TV camera system would perform infrared image scans of the moon’s surface.

Nickel-cadmium batteries, augmented with silver-zinc cell batteries, supplied power for Pioneer 1 and the television camera system.

NASA communicated with Pioneer 1 using radio frequencies 108.06 and 115 MHz.

The spacecraft sat atop a 91-foot-tall two-stage Thor-Able I-130 rocket.

Liftoff of Pioneer 1 occurred Sunday, Oct. 11, 1958, at 9:42 a.m. Central Standard Time from launch pad 17A at Cape Canaveral, FL.

Unfortunately, the Thor second stage prematurely shut down 10 seconds early because of an instrumentation error from an accelerometer measuring the rocket’s velocity due to an incorrectly set valve.

The early shutdown caused the rocket to become unable to escape the Earth’s gravitational pull needed to head to the moon; instead, Pioneer 1 traveled only 71,300 miles from our planet, putting it roughly 169,000 miles from the moon.

Although Pioneer 1 failed to reach the moon, it did verify the existence of the Van Allen Belts, obtain data on the region of space surrounding the Earth known as the magnetosphere, and take the first measurements of the thickness of micrometeorites.

After 43 hours, the spacecraft’s mission ended when it reentered the Earth’s atmosphere Oct. 13, 1958, over the South Pacific Ocean.

July 31, 1964, the NASA Ranger 7 spacecraft traveled 243,665 miles and took the first high-quality moon photographs approximately 17 minutes before impacting the lunar surface.

“Moon Photos Are Modern Lewis, Clark” is the title of an Aug. 2, 1964, Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper column.

“In a sense, Ranger 7’s six television cameras performed the same service for this country on the moon’s Sea of Clouds in 16 minutes and 40 seconds Friday morning that Lewis and Clark performed in the Pacific Northwest from 1803 to 1806,” the column stated.

Another sentence in the column accurately said, “Ranger 7’s flight is but the beginning of a lunar exploration program that can only grow increasingly more intense.”

The name “Pioneer 1” was coined by Stephen A. Saliga, an official in charge of Air Force exhibits at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, who designed a display to coincide with the launch.

Pioneer 1 on launch pad 17A at Cape Canaveral, FL.

I want to put a ding in the universe

© Mark Ollig

The title of today’s column is a quote by the late Apple Computer co-founder Steve Jobs, who passed away ten years ago on Oct. 5, 2011.

Four months earlier, the 5,200-member audience at the Moscone Center in San Francisco greeted the 56-year-old Jobs with thunderous applause as he took the stage during the opening of Apple Computer’s Worldwide Developers Conference held on June 6, 2011.

Jobs returned from being on medical leave to give what turned out to be his last Apple Computer keynote presentation address.

The following is from the June 13, 2011 column I wrote of his address, which includes a few edits:

Physically, Jobs appeared thin – but acted enthusiastically walking back and forth on stage while gesturing with his hands while talking about Apple’s new iCloud.

“Now, some people think the cloud is just a hard disk in the sky,” Jobs declared.

He continued, “We think it’s way more than that, and we call it iCloud.”

Jobs described the iCloud, saying, “It’s a large place and it’s full of stuff. Full of expensive stuff. We are ready, we think, for customers to start using iCloud, and we can’t wait to get it in their hands.”

If every cloud has a silver lining, Apple’s iCloud, with a reported price tag of about $1 billion, likely has a gold lining.

Come to think of it, inside a computing cloud, most of the physical computer hardware components, printed circuit boards, and wired connections are gold plated.

Jobs then showed a photo of Apple Computer’s new data center complex (iCloud) in Maiden, NC., on the large display screen behind him.

An aerial photo of the impressive 500,000 square-foot data center building appeared on the screen; Jobs pointed to the two small dots on the roof of the enormous facility.

When he revealed the two dots were two people standing on the roof, the audience laughed.

Jobs expressed determination when he said, “If you don’t think we’re serious about this, you’re wrong.”

One source reported this data center alone has a capacity for 95,000 to 120,000 data servers.

This complex, called iDataCenter, is also known as Apple’s Eastern United States Data Center.

This iCloud will be used initially for storing user iTunes music libraries, shifting the file storage role from the user’s computer onto Apple’s iCloud.

Computing clouds will eventually store much of the information we today keep in our home and business computers and smartphones.

Jobs explained people would no longer need to be tethered to their personal computer or Mac to sync their iPods, iPads, and iPhones containing the iTunes program. Instead, they will be able to sync their devices with iTunes from directly inside the Apple iCloud via Wi-Fi – from wherever they are.

It will become much more convenient to store and retrieve our computing content online from remote data center clouds.

Cloud computing will become something all of us, sooner or later, will take for granted.

“About ten years ago, we had one of our most essential insights, and that was that the PC (personal computer) was going to become the digital hub for your digital life,” Jobs said.

“Where else were you going to put them?” said Jobs.

Jobs explained, “it was driving us crazy,” to continuously back up into a Mac or Windows PC and synchronize new data between iPhones, iPods, and iPads.

Jobs proceeded to describe Apple’s “next big insight.”

“We’re going to demote the PC and Mac to just be a device, just like an iPhone, an iPad, or an iPodtouch, and we’re going to move the digital hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud. Because all these new devices have communications built into them, they can all talk to the cloud whenever they want.” he said.

Jobs presented an example of when a person takes pictures, and their iPhone would send them into the cloud. The photos are then “pushed down” (delivered) from the cloud to the user’s other devices automatically and wirelessly; everything is in sync – no user intervention is necessary.

“Everything happens automatically, and there’s nothing new to learn. It just all works,” Jobs explained.”

On June 6, 2011, Steve Jobs appeared very excited and optimistic about the possibilities of the new iCloud service.

Apple Computer’s iCloud services launched on Oct. 12, 2011, six days after Steve Jobs died.

Today, iCloud consists of eleven data centers, with six of them in the US.

“I want to put a ding in the universe,” Steve Jobs said during a 1985 interview while discussing the culture of Apple Computer.

The contributions to the computer industry by Steve Jobs and another Apple Computer co-founder, Steve Wozniak, triggered a technological “ding in the universe” that history will remember decades, centuries, and millennia from now.

Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak