Brief History of Electronics

1870
o Maxwell's theory Electricity and Magnetism states that the electromagnetic theory of light and that
electricity travels at the speed of light. Maxwells equations established that electricity and magnetism
are aspects or the same entity.

1887
o Heinrich Hertz
o Discovered the existence of radio waves that his calculations became accepted.
o He supplied an electric charge to a capacitor and inductor, and then short-circuited the capacitor
through a spark gap. Charges surging back and forth, created an oscillating electric discharge. Some of
the energy of this oscillation was radiated from the spark gap in the form of electromagnetic waves at
radio frequencies. (OSCILLATION something moving back and forth)

VACUUM TUBES
o The development of vacuum tubes marked the beginning of electronics.
o Thomas Alva Edison discovered the vacuum tubes
o He discovered that a current will flow between the hot filament of an incandescent lamp and another
electrode placed in the same lamp, and that this current will flow in only one direction.

1904
o John Ambrose Fleming
o Observed that current would only flow in one direction in such a device.
o Since this device consisted of an anode and a cathode it was called a diode and used as a radio
detector.
1906
o Lee De Forest mounted a third element, the grid, between the filament and cathode of a vacuum tube.
o He called an audion but which is now called a triode (three-element tube).
o It was first used only as a detector, but its potentialities as an amplifier and oscillator were soon
developed.
1912
o Greenleaf Whittier Pickard
o Discovered the rectifying properties of crystals. (Crystal Detector -one of the first devices widely used for
receiving radio broadcasts)
o Also one of the first scientists to demonstrate the wireless electromagnetic transmission of speech.
Improvements in electronics continued through the 30s and was especially rapid during World War II.
The development of the cavity magnetron was a very significant event that greatly improved the capabilities of
the Allies to detect enemy ships and planes.
Airborne radar even provided a means for bombing without actually seeing the target.
1943.
o The beginnings of electronic countermeasures can also be traced back to this period including the use of
window to hinder radar detection
o Another significant aspect was the decoding of enemy radio transmissions which was one of the factors
that greatly speeded up the development of the computer.
1944
o Howard H. Aiken, a Harvard engineer working with IBM, succeeded in producing an all-electronic
calculator. The purpose of this machine was to create ballistic charts for the U.S. Navy. It was about half
as long as a football field and contained about 500 miles of wiring.
o The machine was slow (taking 3-5 seconds per calculation) and inflexible (in that sequences of
calculations could not change).
1948
o Another computer development spurred by the war was the Electronic Numerical Integrator and
Computer (ENIAC), produced by a partnership between the U.S. government and the University of
Pennsylvania.
o Consisting of 18,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors and 5 million soldered joints, the computer was
such a massive piece of machinery that it consumed 160 kilowatts of electrical power, enough energy to
dim the lights in an entire section of Philadelphia.
In the mid-1940's
o John von Neumann (1903-1957) joined the University of Pennsylvania team, initiating concepts in
computer design that remained central to computer engineering for the next 40 years.
1951
o The UNIVAC I (Universal Automatic Computer), built by Remington Rand, became one of the first
commercially available computers to take advantage of these advances.
1948
o The invention of the transistor greatly changed the electronics industry. The transistor replaced the
large, cumbersome vacuum tube in televisions, radios and computers. As a result, the size of electronic
machinery has been shrinking ever since.
2
nd
Generation of computer (1956)
o Coupled with early advances in magnetic-core memory, transistors led to second generation computers
beginning in 1956 that were smaller, faster, more reliable and more energy-efficient than their
predecessors.
Early 1960's
o there were a number of commercially successful second generation computers used in business,
universities, and government.
Though transistors were clearly an improvement over the vacuum tube, they still generated a great deal of heat, which
damaged the computer's sensitive internal parts.
1958
o Jack Kilby, an engineer with Texas Instruments, developed the integrated circuit (IC)
o This IC combined three electronic components onto a small silicon disc.
1959
o Robert Noyce of Fairchild independently developed an integrated circuit that was fabricated using
techniques similar to what is used today.
1980
o very large scale integration (VLSI) squeezed hundreds of thousands of components onto a chip. Ultra-
large scale integration (ULSI) increased that number into the millions. The ability to fit so much onto an
area about half the size of a U.S. dime helped diminish the size and price of computers and also
increased their power, efficiency and reliability.
1971
o The Intel 4004 chip, took the integrated circuit one step further by locating all the components of a
computer (central processing unit, memory, and input and output controls) on a minuscule chip.
Whereas previously the integrated circuit had had to be manufactured to fit a special purpose, now one
microprocessor could be manufactured and then programmed to meet any number of demands .

The 1980s saw a great expansion in computer use as personal computers became more affordable.
The number of personal computers in use more than doubled from 2 million in 1981 to 5.5 million in 1982.
Ten years later, 65 million PCs were in use and numbers have continued to grow very rapidly.