What inventions do you think were integral in the development of modern computer?

Answer 1

A number of inventions were necessary for the development of modern computers. Here are some of them:

The transistor - The first transistor was actually made in Canada. Then, months later, another type of transistor was invented by the Bell Labs team in the US, under the direction of William Shockley. For most applications, the transistor replaced the vacuum tube. This helped make modern computers because vacuum tubes were large, stayed hot, and consumed lots of power. The first electronic computer took up to 7 large rooms. Some rumor that it is now only used to heat the Smithsonian Building. But the invention of the transistor greatly reduced the size of the computers that could be produced back then and paved the way for integrated circuits.

Very Large Scale Integration - Lynn Conway came up with some design rules that would help simplify the creation of large scale integrated circuit designs. Her colleagues took some time before taking her ideas seriously, not just because of possible sexism or transphobia, but because IC fabrication was (and still is) a very expensive process. They were impressed at how well her ideas simplified the process and gave them more room to work with on the die. So this discovery led to even smaller integrated circuits and the ability to cram more stuff into an IC.

Storage technologies - Modern computers would not be possible without hard drives. IBM was among the first to create computer hard drives. About 3 to 5 megabytes was considered a lot, and 10 to 31 Mb hard drives were common in new IBM PCs. They started with FM encoding, then MFM encoding, then RLL and SCSI, and now SATA and SAS. Interestingly, MFM and RLL hard drives were roughly the same, though RLL drives were built to tighter technical specs. The electrical connectors were all the same and carried all the same signals and voltages. The main difference was in the controller board, which was a separate board then. And yes, many people did reformat MFM drives using RLL controllers, and while not the most reliable arrangement, it worked. IDE (close cousin to SATA) drives actually used a variation of the RLL compression scheme, and they added Zoned-Bit Recording, which means different numbers of sectors exist on different tracks. A downside was that end users could not redo the low-level formatting. SATA built upon that by changing how the data was sent to the bus, but was otherwise IDE compatible, making adapters between them possible.

Display technologies - Laptops were designed mainly because computer scientists wanted to be able to do their work anywhere. In the process, LCD and LED monitors were created. Oh, there were portable computers with CRTs, but they were still bulky and heavy. The LCD technology had a lot to be desired for years. It was grainy and would "bleed," but it was usable. As more were produced, the better the designs became. Then it reached a point where decent LED and LCD monitors were feasible enough to use for making televisions and desktop monitors. This also paved the way for "all-in-one" desktops