Transistors Quotes

Last time I checked, the digital universe was expanding at the rate of five trillion bits per second in storage and two trillion transistors per second on the processing side. ~ George Dyson

By the 1980's and 1990's, Moore's Law had emerged as the underlying assumption that governed almost everything in the Valley, from technology to business, education, and even culture. The "law" said the number of transistors would double every couple of years. It dictated that nothing stays the same for more than a moment; no technology is safe from its successor; costs fall and computing power increases not at a constant rate but exponentially: If you're not running on what became known as " Internet time," you're falling behind. ~ John Markoff

a digital design engineer, you would spend long hours going through the TTL Data Book familiarizing yourself with the types of TTL chips that were available. Once you knew all your tools, you could actually build the computer I showed in Chapter 17 out of TTL chips. Wiring the chips together is a lot easier than wiring individual transistors ~ Charles Petzold

Let us consider Elfland as a great national park, a vast and beautiful place where a person goes by himself, on foot, to get in touch with reality in a special, private, profound fashion. But what happens when it is considered merely as a place to "get away to"?
Well, you know what has happened to Yosemite. Everybody comes, not with an ax and a box of matches, but in a trailer with a motorbike on the back and a motorboat on top and a butane stove, five aluminum folding chairs, and a transistor radio on the inside. They arrive totally encapsulated in a secondhand reality. And then they move on to Yellowstone, and it's just the same there, all trailers and transistors. They go from park to park, but they never really go anywhere; except when one of them who thinks that even the wildlife isn't real gets chewed up by a genuine, firsthand bear.
The same sort of thing seems to be happening to Elfland, lately. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The discovery of the Quantized Hall Effect (QHE) was the result of systematic measurements on silicon field effect transistors - the most important device in microelectronics. ~ Klaus Von Klitzing

Carbon nanotubes are amazing because they're really good electrical conductors, yet they are only a few atoms in diameter. You can make transistors out of them in the same way you can with silicon. At Berkeley, we made the narrowest device anybody had ever made. It was basically a single molecule. ~ Paul McEuen

My younger brother will remember that he received a transistor radio for Christmas. I took it apart and it never worked again. ~ Stephen Elop

Some consider UNIX to be the second most important invention to come out of AT&T Bell Labs after the transistor. ~ Dennis Ritchie

I began to realize something - to understand the future you have to understand physics. Physics of the last century gave us television, radio, microwaves, gave us the Internet, lasers, transistors, computers - all of that from physics. ~ Michio Kaku

Have you noticed, now, the way people talk so loudly in snackbars and cinemas, how the shelved back gardens shudder with prodigies of talentlessness, drummers, penny-whistlers, vying transistors, the way you see and hear the curses and sign-language of high sexual drama at the bus-stops under ghosts of clouds, how life has come out of doors? And in the soaked pubs the old-timers wince and weather the canned rock. We talk louder to make ourselves heard. We will all be screamers soon. ~ Martin Amis

It's amazing. It's actually build from old Siemens Telefunken transistors from the 60ties. There is like 10 in there. It's the most powerful distortion you can have. It does not only do distortion, it does so many weird things. You can't control it, it's sound different all the time. But it's an endless source for fantastic sounds. For example the track "Transit" is entirely made with this box. You have to put the guitar sound in. It's like a pedal. ~ Christian Fennesz

I knew when I was a kid that I had a Broadway voice. I wanted to be a rocker, because I grew up in that era of transistor radios at the beach. ~ Patti LuPone

Going down the old mine with a transistor radio. ~ Van Morrison

Fewer than eight hundred Americans earn a Ph.D. in physics each year. Worldwide, the number is probably in the thousands. And yet from this small pool comes the discovery and innovation that shapes the way we live and think. From X-rays, lasers, radio waves, transistors, atomic energy - and atomic weapons - to our view of space and time, and the nature of the universe, all this has arisen from this dedicated pool of individuals. To be a physicist is to have an enormous potential to change the world. ~ Leonard Mlodinow

One son appears in stereo - a transistor in one ear and the phone in the other.. ~ Erma Bombeck

Why are we so afraid of silence? Teenagers cannot study without their records; they walk along the street with their transistors. Grownups are as bad if not worse; we turn on the TV or the radio the minute we come into the house or start the car. The pollution of noise in our cities is as destructive as the pollution of air. We show our fear of silence in our conversation: I wonder if the orally-minded Elizabethan's used "um" and "er" the way we do? And increasingly prevalent is what my husband calls an articulated pause: "You know." We interject "you know" meaninglessly into every sentence, in order that the flow of our speech should not be interrupted by such a terrifying thing as silence. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

My parents didn't like me. For bathtub toys they gave me a blender and a transistor radio. ~ Rodney Dangerfield

Let the people decide through the marketplace mechanism what they wish to see and hear. Why is there this national obsession to tamper with this box of transistors and tubes when we don't do the same for Time magazine? ~ Mark S. Fowler

The transistor was a small plastic unit that would take us from a world of static bricks piled on top of each other to a world where everything was interactive. ~ Ayah Bdeir

I have nothing against investment banking, but it's like massaging money rather than creating money. If you're in physics, you create inventions, you create lasers, you create transistors, computers, GPS. ~ Michio Kaku

There was little work left of a routine, mechanical nature. Men's minds were too valuable to waste on tasks that a few thousand transistors, some photo-electric cells, and a cubic meter of printed circuits could perform. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

I guess you're familiar with Moore's Law? This states that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit - which basically means memory size and processing speed - will double every eighteen months, and costs will halve. Moore's Law has held with amazing consistency since 1965, and it still holds. ~ Robert Harris

The exponential growth of this industry was correlated with the phenomenon famously discovered by Moore, who in 1965 drew a graph of the speed of integrated circuits, based on the number of transistors that could be placed on a chip, and showed that it doubled about every two years, a trajectory that could be expected to continue. This was reaffirmed in 1971, when Intel was able to etch a complete central processing unit onto one chip, the Intel 4004, which was dubbed a "microprocessor." Moore's Law has held generally true to this day, and its reliable projection of performance to price allowed two generations of young entrepreneurs, including Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, to create cost projections for their forward-leaning products. The ~ Walter Isaacson

It is important to note that the design of an entire brain region is simpler than the design of a single neuron. As discussed earlier, models often get simpler at a higher level - consider an analogy with a computer. We do need to understand the detailed
physics ofsemiconductors to model a transistor, and the equations underlying a single real transistor are complex. A digital circuit that multiples two numbers requires hundreds of them. Yet we can model this multiplication circuit very simply with one or
two formulas. An entire computer with billions of transistors can be modeled through its instruction set and register description, which can be described on a handful of written pages of text and formulas. The software programs for an operating system,
language compilers, and assemblers are reasonably complex, but modeling a particular program - for example, a speech recognition programbased on hierarchical hidden Markov modeling - may likewise be described in only a few pages of
equations. Nowhere in such a description would be found the details ofsemiconductor physics or even of computer architecture. A similar observation holds true for the brain. A particular neocortical pattern recognizer that detects a particular invariant
visualfeature (such as a face) or that performs a bandpass filtering (restricting input to a specific frequency range) on sound or that evaluates the temporal proximity of two events can be described with far fewer specific d ~ Ray Kurzweil

The main ingredient of the first quantum revolution, wave-particle duality, has led to inventions such as the transistor and the laser that are at the root of the information society. ~ Alain Aspect

To create silicon chips, UV light is passed through a template that contains the blueprint for all the circuits on a chip. The UV light and a series of chemical reactions creates a pattern that is etched onto a silicon wafer, creating transistors on the chip. ~ Michio Kaku

The number of transistors on an integrated circuit will double in about 18 months. ~ Gordon Moore