General > General Technical Chat
"if it wasn't for the invention of X we wouldn't have Y"
free_electron:
The FET is older than the BJT. The concept of field effect was postulated 20 years BEFORE Shockley/Bardeen/Brattain discovered the BJT. They were actually trying to make a FET but ran into all kinds of problems and discovered the junction transistor instead.
The first BJT did not really have a collector and emitter (it was actually not a BJT, not in the sense Bipolar junction transistor). It was symmetrical . That famous first bipolar transistor was not a NPN or PNP but what came later to be known as a Schottky junction ( metal/semiconductor junction , not a semiconductor-semiconductor junction ). The Base was a slab of doped germanium (hence the name "base") the rest were two gold-germanium junctions. one collected electrons, the other emitted electrons. The base could modulate the conductivity.
Mosfets came later. But, what is used today is no longer a MOSFET. MOS means Metal - oxide - Semiconductor. The gate was metal. That is no longer the case. Not for digital ics. The gate is doped polysilicon. Why ? Because you can make smaller structures in polysilicon than in metal. It is much more resilient to mechanical damage. And stacking metal was problematic : you need an insulation layer inbetween. So the first ic's actually used a layer of polysilicon to create the gates AND do part of the routing. There was 1 metal layer. When I started in semiconductors in 1990 we had one metal layer.
langwadt:
--- Quote from: Circlotron on August 21, 2022, 12:03:31 am ---And what if someone had invented really really good batteries in the late 1800s? So good that no one would have bothered with internal combustion engines? So much of the 20th century would have been different. Oil rich nations would have remained a backwater. Probably fewer wars. Less environmental damage of the type we see today. But I expect people collectively would have found another way to do the horrible things they do.
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what do you think would have been used to charge those batteries?
KE5FX:
--- Quote from: mikeselectricstuff on August 20, 2022, 07:54:29 pm ---Another interesting thing to consider is the opposite - what progress has been hindered by the invention of a non-optimal solution. For example if valves (vacuum tubes) hadn't been invented, would we have got semiconductors sooner ?
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It's been argued that any well-equipped neon sign shop could have built lasers in the 1930s if they'd known how. You have to wonder how that might have altered the course of the next few decades' worth of scientific as well as technological history.
SiliconWizard:
--- Quote from: langwadt on August 21, 2022, 01:50:19 am ---
--- Quote from: Circlotron on August 21, 2022, 12:03:31 am ---And what if someone had invented really really good batteries in the late 1800s? So good that no one would have bothered with internal combustion engines? So much of the 20th century would have been different. Oil rich nations would have remained a backwater. Probably fewer wars. Less environmental damage of the type we see today. But I expect people collectively would have found another way to do the horrible things they do.
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what do you think would have been used to charge those batteries?
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Which is pretty much the same problem we have today... (at least on a large scale.) ::)
pcprogrammer:
--- Quote from: Circlotron on August 21, 2022, 12:03:31 am ---And what if someone had invented really really good batteries in the late 1800s? So good that no one would have bothered with internal combustion engines? So much of the 20th century would have been different. Oil rich nations would have remained a backwater. Probably fewer wars. Less environmental damage of the type we see today. But I expect people collectively would have found another way to do the horrible things they do.
--- End quote ---
How different would things be if oil was not discovered? Modern society would probably not exist as it is today. So many products depend(ed) on crude oil. Think of the petrochemical industry.
Having it reduce on wars, probably not, because something in human nature drives us to them constantly. "Hey this is mine, you can't have it. What the hell you took it, this means war." Just take a good look at history way back before the combustion engine came into play. It is filled with war. Nations are build on it.
It is not just humans to be fair. Take a good look at nature and there is "war" all over the place. Plants competing over sun light, animals competing over food, etc. We just took it to the next level.
You can't blame the environmental damage just on fossil fuels. With or without, there would be a lot of problems just because of human existence. So much nature had to make way for our living needs, but also, and probably much worse for the environment, all the space we fill with the rubbish we produce. Sure it has exploded in the last 150 years or so, but it basically started with the first man walking.
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