The transistor as a digital computer component

Digital computers have been defined as machines that use a language explicitly and one may think of them as carrying on interior dialogues. This concept helps to illustrate one difference between the modern computer and other electronic machinery. The principal function of most electronic apparatus is to take low level signals and raise them to a power level sufficient to drive some device such as a loud speaker, servo motor, relay, or perhaps a cathode-ray tube. In a digital computer, however, there may be a thousand active elements that merely converse with one another. There may be a million alterations of state before an output device has to be energized. These internal operations need not be carried out at any particular power level. It is only necessary for one device to talk loud enough for the next device to recognize what was said. Devices are needed which have stable states that can be changed by very low input signal power. As the computer art advances, one hopes it will move towards the use of devices that listen intently rather than speak loudly. It is in this direction that the transistor can make its earliest contribution to the digital computer field.