3: Electronic Computing

- Today, computers use transistors that are smaller than 50 nanometers in size -- for reference, a sheet of paper is roughly 100,000 nanometers thick. 1 mm = 1,000,000 nanometers. They are not only incredibly small, but they are also super fast - they can switch states millions of times per second and can run for decades. 
This transistor and semiconductor developed in the Santa Clara Valley between San Francisco and San Jose, California. Since the most common material used to create semiconductors is silicon, this region soon became known as Silicon Valley. 
- Even William Shockley moved there, founding Shockley Semiconductor, whose employees later founded Fairchild Semiconductors, whose employees later founded Intel, the world's largest computer chip maker today. 
-  William Shockley and other 2 scientists invented a transistor in 1947 to reduce cost and size, as well as improve reliability and speed because a radical new electronic switch would be necessary, and a whole new era of computing was born from then on.
- A transistor could switch between on and off states 10,000 times per second. Unlikely vacuum tubes made of glass, fragile components, transistors were solid material known as a solid-state component.  Also, they could be made smaller than the smallest possible relays or vacuum tubes, which led to dramatically smaller and cheaper computers, like the IBM 608 in 1957. It was the first fully transistor-powered, commercially available computer. It contained 3,000 transistors and could perform 4,500 additions, or roughly 80 multiplications or divisions, every second. IBM soon transitioned all of its computing products to transistors, bringing transistor-based computers into offices, and eventually, homes.