COMPUTERS GET SMALLER
Vacuum tubes were big, bulky, ran really hot, and sucked a lot of electrical
“juice”. Just after World War II research began on semiconductors,
replacements for the vacuum tube. Various materials for their construction
were tried with different levels of success, with the first silicon transistor
(short for “transfer resistor”) appearing in 1954. By 1960, a new style of
transistor was invented – and that's when things really took off.
Transistors replaced vacuum tubes almost immediately. Transistors
were more reliable, ran cooler, were easily mass produced, and were far
smaller than tubes – large radios which needed to be plugged into an AC
outlet were immediately replaced by smaller portable (hand-held) radios
which ran on 9 volt batteries (in fact, those rectangular batteries are still
often referred to by old-timers [like me] as “radio batteries”).
Computers became more dependable, less expensive, and much smaller
after the introduction of transistors. By saying “much smaller”, I mean they
became ridiculously large instead of impossibly large; computers went
from being room-sized to closet-sized, but they were still really big. It
wasn't until the development of an affordable silicon microchip (invented
in the late 1960's and developed through the 1970's) that computers
became small enough and, best of all, affordable enough, to become
home appliances, which happened after the microchip began to replace
the transistor.
A CHESS COMPUTER ON THE TABLE
Owning an actual computer was still a dream of many people in the
1970's; even a very simple pocket calculator was something of an
expenditure. A basic pocket calculator in the mid-1970's cost several
hours' pay to purchase; you can buy a more advanced disposable
calculator these days for under a dollar. By contrast, when I was in the
eighth grade in the mid-Seventies my physics teacher took considerable
pains to teach us to use plastic slide rules, which you could then buy
practically anywhere for a dollar or two; today it's almost impossible to
find a slide rule anywhere outside of a museum and, if you do see one for
sale, it's usually prohibitively expensive.
But dedicated computers (that is, a computer dedicated to a single task,
as opposed to today's multi-purpose PCs) for the home market started
to make their appearance in the mid-1970's. Simple computer games
(usually based on sports, like baseball or football) became hot gift items
during this time. And it was during this period that chess computers first
became available to the public, but they were insanely expensive (at
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