Beyond the power variant, it sometimes seems as though we rarely encounter a discrete transistor these days, such has been the advance of integrated electronics. But they have a rich history, going ...

The first transistor was about half an inch high. That's mammoth by today's standards, when 7 million transistors can fit on a single computer chip. It was nevertheless an amazing piece of technology.

In What’s the point?: The Point Contact transistor I discussed Shockley’s white paper on the theory of the Point Contact Transistor. Let’s look further into this early transistor design. It is ...