The Day the Earth Stood Still

[progressive hunter]

It was a death ray created by Killer Kane in the Buck Rogers comic strips in the 30's, so there is no problem at all.

I thought it was Leonardo DiCaprio several hundred yrs ago??

 

[Mushroom]

The IC was developed at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1959.

Yes, but not as people think of them today. Today, they hear "IC" and think of something akin to a CPU with millions and more transistors all on a single chip. I want to say those early IC had two, maybe at the very most three or four transistors on them. I did use a few in the early 1980s, they were not much different than transistors I would have used individually.

That is why when people look at the image below, they likely have to adjust how they think.

Now for the kids, that is an original Pong board. Those chips are not RAM, there is no RAM. And don't look for a CPU, there is none. The entire population of the board is just bipolar transistors with a few capacitors and resisters. And I want to say a clock chip and a few diodes. That is not even as advanced as the "toy" 4 bit CPU kits you can make today.



Because in the end, all a CPU really is is a lotta transistors all packaged together. The first "CPU" was the previously mentioned Intel 4004, with 2,300 transistors. A modern x86 CPU has billions of transistors. But prior to the 4004, all an IC was was a couple of transistors. Not even close to what people think about today when they hear "IC".