When Bell Labs held a press conference in June 1948 to announce that its scientists had invented the transistor, it wasn’t easy to understand why these wired blocks of germanium merited a special announcement. The New York Times buried the story on page 46. Time magazine did better, reporting the invention under the headline “Little Brain Cell.” Yet even Shockley, who never underestimated his own importance, couldn’t have imagined that soon thousands, millions, and billions of these transistors would be employed at microscopic scale to replace human brains in the task of computing.
