psikeyhackr wrote:The TRANSISTOR

Integrated Circuits are lots of transistors.

psik

Again though thats outside the 50 year remit of this vote. Texas Instruments had constructed working ones in the early to mid 1950s

Refrigeration again doesn't fall in the last 50 years. Artificial refrigeration was around in the 18th century and devices like modern fridges were available for home use in the 1920s

Jumbo wrote:

psikeyhackr wrote:The TRANSISTOR

Integrated Circuits are lots of transistors.

psik

Again though thats outside the 50 year remit of this vote. Texas Instruments had constructed working ones in the early to mid 1950s

Refrigeration again doesn't fall in the last 50 years. Artificial refrigeration was around in the 18th century and devices like modern fridges were available for home use in the 1920s

http://inventors.about.com/od/istartinv ... ircuit.htm

In 1961 the first commercially available integrated circuits came from the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation. All computers then started to be made using chips instead of the individual transistors and their accompanying parts. Texas Instruments first used the chips in Air Force computers and the Minuteman Missile in 1962. They later used the chips to produce the first electronic portable calculators. The original IC had only one transistor, three resistors and one capacitor and was the size of an adult's pinkie finger. Today an IC smaller than a penny can hold 125 million transistors.

Jack Kilby holds patents on over sixty inventions and is also well known as the inventor of the portable calculator (1967). In 1970 he was awarded the National Medal of Science. Robert Noyce, with sixteen patents to his name, founded Intel, the company responsible for the invention of the microprocessor, in 1968. But for both men the invention of the integrated circuit stands historically as one of the most important innovations of mankind. Almost all modern products use chip technology.

The first commercially available is not the first example. The first working integrated circuit was in the 1950s. Patents for them predate even this. Kilby mentioned in your post demonstrated his working IC in September 1958. Thus the integrated circuit and the microchip are too old to really be in the vote.

the internet. the chip was the breakthrough in miniaturisation that made it possible, but it didn't change the way we do things as profoundly as the internet has. i can now talk to people i am unlikely to ever meet and i don't need to be introduced to them.

Hmmmp, I can't find the results of the BBC website poll..

I don't think people fully understand the impact that the internet will have. The printing press combined with the idea that even if you weren't nobility you could still learn cool things produced the Renaissance. The internet combined with the idea that we are all human and have to share a fragile earth will produce something much, much more powerful.

I can't wait.