Pioneers of computing

[William Donzelli]

> > This is a bit interesting in that Brattain, Bardeen and Shockley are
> > credited in the popular press as having invented the transistor.
> > However, that was a bit overstated; they had to re-word their patent
> > application to state that they'd developed a "junction" transistor, when
> > a patent search turned up the fact that a Hungarian immigrant named
> > Julius Lilienfeld had obtained a patent on a field-effect transistor in
> > 1930--a full year before he obtained a patent on the electrolytic
> > capacitor (ever heard of those?.  Dr. J applied for the patent in 1926,
> > which is a bit mind-boggling, when you consider that tubes like the
> > UV20A1 were introduced in 1924.   It's those field-effect transistors
> > that are widely used today, not Shockley and chums' bipolar cousins.

Be careful handing out the praise. The idea of adding a external
signals and biases to crystal detectors was an old trick from the
1920s. No one really knew what was going on, and no one really used
this technology, simply because performance was beyond horrid - even
original Audions worked better.

--
Will