In a 1950 article, Business Week noted, ???Salesmen will find the market limited. The UNIVAC is not the
kind of machine that every office could use.??? And though the story is probably apocryphal, the lore of computing
attributes the following prediction to Thomas Watson, the founder of IBM, in 1943: ???I think there is a world
market for maybe five computers.???
In the early 1950s, a group of scientists working at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey was studying
the behavior of crystals as semiconductors in an attempt to replace vacuum tubes. Its work resulted in the
development of the transistor, which changed the way computers and many electronic devices were built.
Transistors switch and modulate electric current in much the same way as a vacuum tube. Using transistors
instead of vacuum tubes in computers resulted in machines that were much smaller and cheaper, and that
required considerably less electricity to operate. The transistor is one of the most important inventions in the
20th century.
While computer companies such as IBM and Honeywell focused on the development of mainframe
computers, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) focused on the development of smaller computers. DEC??™s
PDP series of computers were small and designed to serve the computing needs of laboratories.
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