History Demystified

In case you didn't realise the revolution I was talking about in the previous post, here's what was happening in the world.

The oldest radio that my grandfather had was built with vacuum tubes - the only "switches" available to the world of electrical engineering then. The smaller ones which came after this had these vacuum tubes replaced with transistors. That meant that it took less space and transmission was immediately available as the transistors were devices which required no heating up time.

'AM' or Amplitude Modulation was the only medium of radio transmission for a very long time. 'FM' or Frequency Modulation came much later on. The communication engineers had been in a phase of great creativity. (I remembered all this vividly during my Communication Systems course at BITS Pilani. I made a 'D' in that course.)

I also had shivers up my spine when I read Tom Lee's book a few years back and he talked about the 'V.HOLD' (vertical hold) control on old television sets and how it was the first rudimentary phase locked loop (PLL) which needed to be manually locked from time to time. 

The BMW toy car that I had was one of the earliest things I saw which had put to good use the advances in mechanical and electrical engineering and the first example of a decision making (feedback) circuit that I saw.

Sinclair Research was a spectacular company. The early 1980's saw a spurt in commercial products utilising man's ability to make transistors smaller and fit on integrated board in chip form - and Sir Clive Sinclair was one of the first on the bandwagon. My cousins' computer was a ZX Spectrum. A massive commerical hit. It's heart was a VLSI chip known as a microprocessor. It was called the Zilog80 - Z80 in short.

(I shall be forever grateful to these cousins of mine. I knew about microprocessor machine code when I was 12 years old. Too bad I didn't own a computer then.)

Sinclair Research failed because of one solitary reason - it was incredibly ahead of its time. It was trying to do things technology would be able to realise only in the future. 1984 was really the year of doom for Sinclair.

More so, because in 1984 a young feller by the name of Steve Jobs introduced to the world a revolutionary new machine. It was called the Apple Macintosh. It used a new input device called a "mouse" and ran a "graphical user interface" operating system called the Mac OS. (My owning the MacBook today is my way of being a part of this legacy.)

The PC's which followed were a result of the rapid shrinking in transistor sizes. They stayed the same size but became more and more powerful. For example, the 486 microprocessor used the same area as the 386 but also had a mathematical co-processor on chip. With the 386 if you wanted faster math, you'd have to fix a separate processor on your motherboard. It was called the 387. 

I didn't know when I tried my hand with 'V.HOLD' on my grandfather's TV set, that I would work for a chip design company in a group which dealt with PLL's. I didn't know that I would specialise in integrated circuits which brought my beloved computers to my doorstep and eventually on to my lap. When I saw the first "transistor radio" I didn't know that many years later I would have the opportunity to teach to hundreds of people, the nuances of the device that made this fascinating gadget a reality.

When in 2001, I stood for the first time in front of more than two hundred people and proudly said, "The first edition of the Pentium has 42 million transistors on two centimetre square silicon", I knew that in a way I was fulfilling a prophecy. I was paying silent homage to the solitary transistor in the famous transistor radio.

Do you see how proud a flagbearer I am?