Second Generation

Background
To have vacuum tubes handle ones and zeros makes for very bulky computers that needed to be cooled, and were difficult to maintain. A big step forward in computer technology was replacing the vacuum tubes with transistors.

William Shockley
William Shockley graduated from Cal Tech in 1932 and received his Ph. D from M.I.T. in 1936. In 1947, while working for Bell Labs he developed the first transistor. It took years to perfect the "Shockley Sandwich", which allowed for the conversion of bulky radios to transistor radios and the shrinking of mainframes computers to minicomputers. Shockley left Bell Labs in 1955 and in 1956 was awarded the Nobel Prize. He settled in California where he had grown up and where his mother still lived, and founded his own company to produce transistors. He is generally considered the very founder of the Silicon Valley industry, or the man who brought the silicon to the Silicon Valley.

The Gossip Corner
Shockley was a very competitive man, and a man difficult to work with. In the 1960s he formulated the theory that Black people had inheritently a lower IQ than Caucasian people. Needless to say his inflammatory speeches were controversial.