Head of the American Computer Company.
Extracted from Nexus Magazine(June-July 1999)
The symbol for the transistor is made up
of three pieces: positive, positive and negative;
or negative, negative and positive... silicon dioxide
doped with arsenic and boron, in 1947. Now, in
1947, doping things with boron was not easy.
It required the sort of equipment that even
Bell Labs in 1946 did not possess. They had this type
of equipment at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories –
but it would have taken thousands and thousands
and thousands of man-hours to invent the transistor.
If you look back at it historically, what AT&T was
claiming was that one day this "genius",
William Shockley, was working with a rectifier;
he looked at it and he noticed it had unusual
propensities, and there, bingo, he invented the
transistor! He figured it out right there!
In any event, for most of my young life I believed
that the transistor had come from a government
project and that they were just hiding its origins.
Which government project, I did not realize until
I saw the Shopkeeper’s Notebook in the possession
of my friend, the consultant.
