1950 to 1959: Starting the Ascent of Digital Computers and Software - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 86

During this decade, several major inventions began the expansion of computers
and software from being massive and complex laboratory instruments to becoming
global commercial products.
Two critical background inventions, among the most important in the history
of science, were the development of transistors to replace vacuum tubes and the
invention of integrated circuits to replace discrete electronic components. The first
silicon transistor was produced by Texas Instruments in 1974. However, a long
history led to this result.
In 1947, William Bardeen and Walter Brattan of AT&T Bell Labs developed
a prototype semiconductor based on Germanium. The group leader, William
Shockley, participated in expanding the idea. In 1956, Bardeen, Brattan, and
Shockley received the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the transistor
effect.
They were not alone; even earlier work by Julius Lillenfield in the 1920s and
by Oskar Heil in the 1930s led to both patenting concepts similar to transistors.
However, these did not lead to working models.
Incidentally, the term “transistor” was coined by John R. Pierce of Bell Labs
from the combination of the words “transfer resistor.” Bell Labs was the research
arm of AT&T. Fortunately for the industry, Bell scientists recommended sharing
and licensing transistor technology. In 1952, Bell Labs sponsored a nine-day tran-
sistor technology symposium, which attracted 100 researchers. Of those who par-
ticipated, 40 each paid a $25,000 license fee to gain access to transistor techno-
logy.
The openness with patents and intellectual property in the 1950s is very differ-
ent from today's fierce patent wars, which are threatening to stifle innovation or at
least make new products extremely expensive to build due to artificially high pat-
ent license fees. This era was also before the “patent troll” subindustry appeared.
The companies in this group buy patent rights not because of their intellectual
value but rather because of their use as threats to gain royalty payments.
In 1949, a German scientist from Siemens AG filed a patent for an integrated
circuit that he envisioned would use transistors. Later in 1952, Geoffrey Dummer
from the British Royal Radio Establishment gave a public lecture on the need for
integrated circuits.
In about 1950, a Russian researcher, S. A. Lebedev, built a vacuum tube digital
computer in Ukraine called MESM to solve equations in nuclear engineering and