The transistor and the chip

On 16 December 1947, at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain pressed two closely spaced gold contacts onto a slab of high-purity germanium and saw a signal come out stronger than it went in. A week later, on 23 December, they demonstrated it to the lab's managers. Their group leader, William Shockley, called it a magnificent Christmas present.

Bell Labs wanted a replacement for the vacuum tubes and mechanical switches in the telephone network. It got the device that would make every later computer possible.