1.2. A SHORT HISTORY OF ELECTRONICS

Although Electronics started just about eighty years ago. It went through quite some stages within this rather short period. It started in the 20ties of this century, when RADIO TECHNOLOGY was born.

The first challenge was to produce more sound for the listener, and this made it necessary to invent VALVES.

During the 30 ties there was the challenge to handle higher frequencies, and when this goal was achieved, it was possible to think of trials with RADAR and TELEVISION.

In the 40ties the first experiments with so called “ELECTRONIC BRAINS” (later they were called COMPUTERS) were carried out. At the end of the 40ties - just after the second world war - the SEMICONDUCTORS were more closely researched and led to the inventing of DIODES and TRANSISTORS.

Those new components were very helpful in building much smaller computers which were very important for the first travels to space.

Now the field of application of electronic equipment grew very fast.

On other very important step connected with this field of technology was the change of method to manufacture the circuits:

- while in the first radios the circuit had been WIRED like all the devices

- lateron it was found more economical (because it was much faster and possible with much less faults) to wire it by so called PRINTED CIRCUITS (Insulating boards with copper lines on it, which represent the wires, and which can be “printed” on the boards)

- the next step was to find a way to “engrave” whole circuits on a very small piece of semiconducting material. Such circuits were called then “INTEGRATED CIRCUITS” - they can hold nowadays thousands of transistors.