The first transistor was about half an inch high. That's mammoth by today's standards, when 7 million transistors can fit on a single computer chip. It was nevertheless an amazing piece of technology.

The sandwich transistor was William Shockley's brainchild. It's also called the junction transistor. While the rest of the lab was busy researching Bardeen and Brattain's point-contact transistor ...

Beyond the power variant, it sometimes seems as though we rarely encounter a discrete transistor these days, such has been the advance of integrated electronics. But they have a rich history ...