The Digital Revolution

In 1946, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer filled an entire basement at the University of Pennsylvania. ENIAC weighed thirty tons, consumed 150 kilowatts of electricity, and required a team of six women to program it by physically rewiring its cables and flipping thousands of switches. It could perform about five thousand additions per second. The phone in your pocket does roughly eleven trillion operations per second. That gap, a factor of two billion, opened in less than eighty years.

No technology in human history has scaled this fast. The steam engine took a century to reshape manufacturing. Electricity needed decades to reach most households. The A general-purpose computer small and affordable enough for individual use. The concept emerged in the 1970s with machines like the Altair 8800 and Apple II, but the IBM PC (1981) and its clones established the standard. By the mid-1990s, personal computers had become common in offices and homes across the developed world, fundamentally changing how people worked, wrote, calculated, and eventually communicated. went from hobbyist curiosity to ubiquitous office fixture in about fifteen years. The internet went from academic experiment to global infrastructure in roughly ten. The smartphone conquered the planet in under a decade. Each wave arrived faster than the last, and each one rewired daily life in ways that the previous generation could not have predicted.

The digital revolution has a specific birthday: December 16, 1947, at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey. That afternoon, physicists John Bardeen and Walter Brattain demonstrated the first working transistor to their colleague William Shockley. A transistor is a tiny switch that controls the flow of electrical current. It replaced the vacuum tube, which was bulky, fragile, hot, and power-hungry. Vacuum tubes made ENIAC possible. Transistors made everything after ENIAC possible.