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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC)

INTC 34.72

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To: Pigboy who wrote (98137)	2/4/2000 1:44:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (2) of 186894

Pigboy - Transistors did not make significant inroads into computers until the 60s, and even then the "second generation" (solid state) machines were based on germanium not silicon. Early GE and Burroughs germanium machines were extremely sensitive to environment as the switching times for the gates was affected by ambient temperature, and so race conditions would appear if the temperature shifted a few degrees. The basic modules (flip-flops, shift registers etc.) were built on small replaceable cards which were functionally replaced later on by integrated circuits - for a while, during the transition to 3rd generation machines (IC based, although RTL was initially more popular than TTL), the second generation machines were upgraded by simply replacing the diode, capacitor and transistor cards with a matching card containing a single IC... Vacuum tube computers were fairly stable at that time. The NASA Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs made extensive use of IBM 655s which were tube based, and NASA did not move much to solid state until well into the Apollo program.

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