From the 1947 point-contact transistor—a cranky, wet-fingered thing of gold foil and plastic—to the latest 2-nanometer gate-all-around finFETs that were barely a dozen atoms wide. He wanted them all, holding hands, performing one single, useless, perfect calculation.
He left it there, singing its quiet, obsolete, essential song. And somewhere, in the dark of the Oregon rainforest, a monument to everything that ever switched from off to on continued to decide, over and over again, that being a transistor was still worth the trouble. alltransistors
He closed the circuit.
And something happened.