Not to nitpick, but full blown electronic computers were made during WWII using tubes. Add the word cheap, maybe.

The term "debug" came from them. They had high voltages (130VDC), and if a fly wandered into the wrong place a tech would have to find its charred corpse and remove it with tweezers. Given these computer had around 8,000 or so tubes (number is a guess) it could take a while. Their Mean Time Between Failure was measured in minutes.

Hope they used wooden tweezers??! ZZZap!

 

Lastly for now, does this pass for the transistor?

" The Transistor is a semiconductive device used to reroute direct current."

I realize reroute doesn't shed light on its capabilities to amplify a signal, but is it incorrect?

Thanks again,
-M

 

Lastly for now, does this pass for the transistor?

" The Transistor is a semiconductive device used to reroute direct current."

I realize reroute doesn't shed light on its capabilities to amplify a signal, but is it incorrect?

Thanks again,
-M

Doesn't cut it for me.

I would prefer something like

"The transistor is a semiconductor device in which one (or more) of its input terminals are used to control the current flow in the main conductive path".

One might then ask - What about a Thyristor [or a number of other semiconductor devices] - doesn't the same definition apply? One would then need to make a further qualification such as the current control can be accomplished in a continuous or quasi-continuous manner - so it goes on to more than one succinct statement.

 

Thanks for your insight---

 

Hello,

You could also have a look at wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relays
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diode

The first lines will give you a good impression

Bertus

 

...The term "debug" came from them. They had high voltages (130VDC), and if a fly wandered into the wrong place a tech would have to find its charred corpse and remove it with tweezers. Given these computer had around 8,000 or so tubes (number is a guess) it could take a while. Their Mean Time Between Failure was measured in minutes.

Great story!

However I believe the expression "to get the bugs out" is much older than the age of electriciy, and probably came from food storage, one of the oldest problems of man when "bugs" would get into the grain storage or meat storage etc. Picking the bugs out of things to try to make them "good" again would have been a very common task.

 

Still is in my part of Brooklyn

 

"... that's not how this meaning of the word bug appeared in the dictionary. Inventors and engineers had been talking about bugs for more than a century before the moth in the relay incident. Even Thomas Edison used the word. Here's an extract of a letter he wrote in 1878 to Theodore Puskas, as cited in The Yale Book of Quotations (2006):

'Bugs' -- as such little faults and difficulties are called -- show themselves and months of intense watching, study and labor are requisite before commercial success or failure is certainly reached.
​

Word nerds trace the word bug to an old term for a monster -- it's a word that has survived in obscure terms like bugaboo and bugbear and in a mangled form in the word boogeyman. Like gremlins in machinery, system bugs are malicious. Anyone who spends time trying to get all the faults out of a system knows how it feels: After a few hours of debugging, any problems that remain are hellspawn, mocking attempts to get rid of them with a devilish glee.
And that's the real origin of the term "bug." But we think the tale of the moth in the relay is worth retelling anyway. " Reference

But the story of the moth (bug) in the relay is also true. Here is a picture of the operations log...

 

This from Wikipedia under Debug...

There is some controversy over the origin of the term "debugging".

The terms "bug" and "debugging" are both popularly attributed to Admiral Grace Hopper in the 1940s.[1] While she was working on a Mark II Computer at Harvard University, her associates discovered a moth stuck in a relay and thereby impeding operation, whereupon she remarked that they were "debugging" the system. However the term "bug" in the meaning of technical error dates back at least to 1878 and Thomas Edison (see software bug for a full discussion), and "debugging" seems to have been used as a term in aeronautics before entering the world of computers. Indeed, in an interview Grace Hopper remarked that she was not coining the term. The moth fit the already existing terminology, so it was saved.

The Oxford English Dictionary entry for "debug" quotes the term "debugging" used in reference to airplane engine testing in a 1945 article in the Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, Hopper's bug was found on September 9, 1947. The term was not adopted by computer programmers until the early 1950s. The seminal article by Gill [2] in 1951 is the earliest in-depth discussion of programming errors, but it does not use the term "bug" or "debugging". In the ACM's digital library, the term "debugging" is first used in three papers from 1952 ACM National Meetings.[3][4][5] Two of the three use the term in quotation marks. By 1963, "debugging" was a common enough term to be mentioned in passing without explanation on page 1 of the CTSS manual.[6]
Kidwell's article Stalking the Elusive Computer Bug[7] discusses the etymology of "bug" and "debug" in greater detail..

According to Wikipedia, the ENIAC had over 19K tubes. Ouch!

A transistor offers amplification just from its solid state characteristics, it is the gain that makes it useful. All else follows.