• culprit@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    this is pretty good, especially if you understand anything about how semiconductors work

    see there used to just be conductors and insulators - a binary (as was accepted at the time)

    then some people realized you could violate the binary to create new kinds of circuits and something called semiconductors that had properties of both insulators and conductors and could change between them

    this led to all kinds of new possibilities that eventually gave rise to new functional circuits like logic gates and memory cells (flip flops) by wiring these circuits together in ways that had previously been considered impossible

    • TimeSquirrel@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      especially if you understand anything about how semiconductors work

      Hah, I’ve been building things with transistors for 30 years and have yet to fully understand how they work. The hard physics, anyway.

      I guess one doesn’t really need to know that though, as long as its properties in the datasheet are suitable for the application you’re using it for.

    • Hexagon@feddit.it
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      1 year ago

      I’m sorry to ruin your story, but before semiconductors we used vacuum tubes to do the same stuff.

      (Well, they sucked in many ways: they were bulky, heavy, slow, fragile, and hot. But they could do logic gates and everything.)