When we were in school, every description of how transistors work was pretty dry and had a lot of math involved. We suppose you might have had a great instructor who was able to explain things ...

So What Was the Transistor Good For? Transistors may have been useful to the phone company and to a handful of scientists building computers, but that wasn't enough to build an industry.

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 ...