The humble transistor radio is one of those consumer devices that stubbornly refuses to go away, but it’s fair to say that it’s not the mover and shaker in the world of electronics it might on ...

If transistors could replace vacuum tubes in the phone system, then they certainly could replace them in computers too. The army, with its need for ever-faster and more efficient calculations ...

These switches are about as small as they can get—so, sticking with traditional transistor computing won't save space or energy," says Bond. "A few memristors could replace so many transistors ...

So What Was the Transistor Good For? Transistors may have been useful to the phone company and to a handful of scientists building computers, but that wasn't enough to build an industry.