What do you think is the greatest invention in your lifetime so far?

@ElwoodBlues I didn't know you are at least 63 this year; congratulations!

@SomeMichGuy Yep, I'm over two billion seconds old!!!

I don't like to make age an issue so I don't put it in my profile.

@ElwoodBlues Well, I figured you understood the when, and I agree about age-ism.

That truly IS the single most technologically transformative invention of the period, hands-down.

@SomeMichGuy I just looked up Texas Instruments, and they got into the transistor manufacturing business independent of Shockley Semiconductor. I had assumed that anyone who knew how to manufacture transistors had learned it from Shockley and then spun off, like Fairchild Semi, Intel, National, et al.

But TI engineers learned the process from reading patents & publications, and by examining samples provided by Bell Labs. Shockley left Bell Labs and founded his company around the time TI first announced they were manufacturing discrete transistors.

Anyway it came up because Kilby from TI and Noyce from Fairchild independently invented ICs. Kilby won the Nobel in 2000 for the invention; I'm sure Noyce would have shared in the award (Noyce applied earlier and got the first IC patent) but he died in 1990 and Nobels only go to the living.

@ElwoodBlues If Shockley had been nice, we'd STILL have Shockley Electronics. He was an ass even to his co-recipients of the Nobel Prize.