It permitted circuits to be assembled in different areas and then simply connected together. Indeed, even as the Korean War began at the outset of the decade, the concept of the plug-in circuit module had taken form and begun to speed the production of electronic equipment. A hallmark of the development effort, and a sure means of achieving reliability, would be to manufacture standard, modular digital functional blocks that could be combined with little or no change to build complex computing systems. Bridges, the Defense Department's Director of Electronics, told a group of computer manufacturers that digital computers were destined to replace less reliable analog machines in complex military weapons systems of the future. Digital computer technology that had begun as part of the war effort in the forties was refined and then marketed as a commercial product. It was the digital computer advances in the 1950s that laid the groundwork for the successful commercial mainframe and mini computers that would emerge in the 1960s, and later evolve into the personal computers of the 1970s and 1980s. Out of urgent military need came technological marvels that kept the United States in the forefront of science, and chief among these was the advent of digital computers. The tense geopolitical faceoff between east and west found the electronics industry being thrust to the battle's front lines, fervently employing the new solid-state technology in increasingly sophisticated defense and weapons systems. The massive efforts stemming from World War II, the Korean conflict, and the ensuing Cold War resulted in the mobilization of America's greatest scientific minds. Necessity is indeed the mother of invention, and never was necessity greater than during the wars of the 1940s and early fifties. Transistor process technology was refined throughout the decade, which culminated in the development of the first integrated circuit. Initially costly to produce, transistors in the fifties began the trend that the electronics industry has continued ever since: ever-lower cost coupled with greater functionality and integration. Transistors ran cooler and demanded far less power than the vacuum tubes they would begin replacing, producing smaller, faster, and more powerful electronics. The solid-state age had begun, pushing the electronics industry toward modern digital computers and communications. It matured into Shockley's junction transistor, which found a home in countless military and consumer applications. The infant born in 1947 to Bardeen, Brittain, and Shockley-the point-contact transistor-came of age in the 1950s. But as the 1940s drew to a close, a handful of engineers had made a breakthrough that ultimately would change the world. The future seemed limitless, and as the decade dawned, few even realized why. Gas was cheap, tailfins were large, and Americans were consummating their love affair with the open road. Crew-cut kids watched across TV dinners as tales of space travel and futuristic dreams flickered across the screens of RCA consoles. Rock and roll was evolving from rhythm and blues, soon to be heard blaring from transistor radios from Spokane to Baltimore. That is the 1950s, a time of war and then of post-war prosperity. A decade of contradictions: infinite hope for the future coupled with fear of powerful enemies.
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