On Fri, 11 Sep 2020 13:04:38 -0400, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:

> On Fri, 11 Sep 2020 00:51:34 -0000 (UTC), Martin Gregorie
>  declaimed the following:
>
>> Just found a copy and reread it, and one thing Asimov didn't even
>>remotely forsee when he wrote that in the late 1950s was the low cost
>>and high speed with which solid state electronics could be churned out.
>>
>>
>  Well... At that point in time, the consumer exposure to "solid
state
> electronics" was the transistorized AM radio -- a radio powered by dry
> cell batteries and small enough to carry around! {And 20-25 years later,
> they've grown into these big bricks you have to lug around on your
> shoulder
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boombox#/media/
File:Sanyo_M9998LU_Boombox.png
> }

Sure - discrete transistors. They worked, and allowed small radio so be
built because, just as a radio built arounf valves only needed 5 or so,
some being multi-function, so an equivalent transistor radio only needed
7, so was a lot smaller but little, if any, cheaper. But this didn't
really translate into computers. The first one I used, an Ellott 503 in
1967, used ferrite core memory and discrete transistor logic, occupied 4
or five double wardrobe sized cabinets, and must have been very expensive
to assemble (39 bit words, so lots of transistors in each register that
all had to be soldered onto circuit boards).

My point? That when he wrote that story, Asimov evidently had no idea
that integrated circuits were coming down the tubes or that they would
not only shrink physical size, but would make circuitry vastly easier and
faster to design and assemble. His comment in 'The Feeling of Power'
about building the computers to run spaceships being the production
bottleneck proves that.



--
Martin    | martin at
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

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