[P_I_Staker]

Tiny radios? You might not care, but back in the day it was the bees knees.

It's always shocking to me how software centric this site is. Everyone here thinks the world revolves around software and electrical engineering didn't exist before, just like it doesn't exist now ;)

Transistor was pretty quickly useful, I think. Integrated circuits took quite a while to catch on. Integrated circuits were available for some time before microprocessors. Microprocessors were arguable available for a long time before they became revolutionary to the average joe.

You could argue that the transistor was a bigger deal than the move to ICs & Microprocessors. You better believe everyone knew how great they were when they got their hands on a radio... it's an iconic moment in technical history.

[XorNot]

"when they got their hands on it".

The transistor was a big deal when people could use it to solve problems. When an ecosystem around it existed.

But it wasn't going to revolutionise anything if it was kept a secret like is being implied with superconductors like the topic title is asking.

I could've been more precise in my language, but the point was that the big revolution of transistorized technology - the game changing stuff - came much further down the line then the original invention.

A small supply of secret transistors wasn't going to give anyone a massive technological advantage.

[P_I_Staker]

>I could've been more precise in my language, but the point was that the big revolution of transistorized technology - the game changing stuff - came much further down the line then the original invention.

This point is really wrong too. It was immediately useful. They could have used the transistors to make unexpected new inventions. There's so many applications, if you were a competent electrical engineer (back then at least), you'd be able to think of many uses.

>A small supply of secret transistors wasn't going to give anyone a massive technological advantage.

That depends on what you're actually holding, and having a handful of microprocessors may not be as useful as you think. Simply owning a few would be of limited utility without computer science, or the developers to make cool stuff. It wouldn't be able to talk to too much. They were doing more than you think with active electronics back then.

You keep barking up the wrong tree. For some background, this is very frustrating, because I've had these discussions repeatedly with "SV types", who can't understand that entire universes of engineering exist outside their comprehension. Meanwhile, fairly minor, poorly adopted tech is something "everyone knows".

People say "it's an SV site" what do you expect? Well, it's also a tech site, and these perspectives are wacky. You can't talk about technology while pretending entire fields don't exist, because they aren't so relevant to you.