So What Was the Transistor Good For? Transistors may have been useful to the phone company and to a handful of scientists building computers, but that wasn't enough to build an industry. Companies ...

Transistors have come a long way. Like everything else electronic, they’ve become both better and cheaper. According to a recent IEEE article, a transistor cost about $8 in today’s money back in the ...

The first transistor radio had four transistors. By the 1970s, engineers could put a few thousand transistors on one chip, enabling the first microprocessors (essentially tiny computers on a chip).

My first battery-powered radio — a ten-transistor Realtone — came from my Aunt Ina when I was about seven. I used to think I was ten, but the songs from 1973 would be wrong: I distinctly remember ...

A handheld AM or FM radio. All handheld radios, as well as desktop radios, use transistors, both discrete as well as contained in chips. The transistor radio was one of the first consumer devices that ...