How was the microchip invented?
Chip's Big Squeeze
How was the microchip invented?
Look closely at your phone. Inside, smaller than a postage stamp, sits a chip with billions of tiny switches crammed together — so many that if you tried to count them one per second, you'd be counting for thirty years. How did anyone figure out how to build something that impossibly small?
In the 1950s, computers were room-sized monsters. Inside each one: thousands of glass vacuum tubes, each as big as a lightbulb, doing the on-off switching that makes computers think. The tubes got scorching hot. They burned out constantly, like popcorn kernels popping one by one, and someone had to climb inside with a ladder to replace them.
