We're fifty years into the future Rupert Goodwins
ZDNet UK
October 18, 2004

Ladies and gentlemen - please raise your glasses and toast the Regency TR-1.
On 18 October, 1954, this revolutionary device was announced in America.
Fifty years later, it has been blamed for rock and roll, the death of the US
consumer electronics industry, the relentless rise of IBM and the shocking
state of modern manners. Not a bad score for a transistor radio.

It wasn't just a transistor radio, of course. It was the first. In fact, it
was the first transistorised mass-market device, and it symbolised the
central role that technology was taking in the post-war world. Never
underestimate the power of such symbols - Thomas Watson Jr., head of IBM,
gave his senior managers a TR-1 apiece to kick-start the company's
transition from valves. That symbolism had a different flavour ten years
later as outfits like Sony and Toshiba used the same technology to smoothly
wrest control of the market from its inventors. Outsourcing fears are
nothing new.

A lot has changed. The TR-1 had four transistors and cost $50; last week I
bought a 256MB SD card - for a radio, appropriately enough - at about the
same price. That has two billion transistors in it, or four thousand times
as many as were used in the entire production run of the Regency. Factoring
in devaluation, each transistor costs around four billion times less. We're
living through an industrial revolution of unparalleled speed and reach -
and it's all borne aloft on a massive tsunami of transistors.

Much more at:

http://www.kurthanson.com/archive/news/102204/index.asp