microelectronics
once upon a time, the world was dark at night. electricity happened in the form of lightning. as late as the 1700s, most of us still believed some god stood on a Heavenly promontory and hurled down lightning as if it were javelins. heck, for all I know, most of us may still believe that. humans don't learn very fast. but engineers do. maybe they're a subspecies. in any case, it's not electricity in massive doses like lightning that I mean to appreciate in this paragraph, but rather tiny little needles and pins of electricity. not the massive rivers of electricity that flow past us in high-voltage cables strung far above our heads, but tiny little sparks of electricity that it would take a billion kajillions of to make into a javelin of lightning. you see, also once upon a time, way back in 1946, we had sorta corralled and broken electricity and we had invented a kazillion different vacuum tubes in which we made it do tricks so we could have radios and things like that. we even had television, although almost nobody knew about it. and then along came 1947, and John Bardeen and Walter Brattain invented the transistor in Bell Labs. if light didn't fall on the dark side of the earth, it should have. something wonderful had just been born. and it had only just begun. almost before that first transistor was strong enough to walk out of the lab, there were newer, smaller, stronger, cleverer transistors. pretty soon, they were everywhere. you couldn't be sure your cereal spoon didn't hold a secret trove of transistors doing something beneficial or malevolent or subversive. humans forgot how to talk to each other and only stood around and marveled at what transistors could do now, and what more they could do now, and what immensely more they could do now. meanwhile, transistors got smaller and smaller and smaller, til now you can't even see them. you vaguely know a million or more are at work in a chip smaller than your thumbnail which is the heart of your computer. and I only know that as hard as I try to keep up with knowing about them, they passed way out of my knowing long ago. but I can tell you this with some confidence: the next time you see a charming prince rescue a desperate princess from an implacable tower on a glass mountain, you can be certain that transistors were busily at work helping him, and they've already gone on to getting the next little spaceship-robot to Venus or Mercury or even to poor, almost forgotten Pluto. transistors are busy and ephemeral. a generation for transistors is about a year and a half. yep, while you just blinked your eyes about that, another generation of transistors just graduated from college, started work, got married and had kids. and by the time I finish this sentence those kids will be thinking about grandkids. you and I can't keep up with them, but thank goodness engineers can.
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