Earliest Possible Use of Solid State Electronics

  1. What were the earliest possible dates for transistors and integrated circuits to be invented?
  2. Following on from their invention, what was the earliest possible date to manufacture them on an industrial scale?
  3. If it was possible to do it 5 or 10 years earlier than OTL what difference would it have made to military equipment and space exploration from 1955 to 1970?
 
There are several possibilities:

(1) The closest to OTL would probably be the Timeline of Silicion Jumpstart with a POD in 1930 on google groups soc.history what if:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/soc.history.what-if/IZOTdD9W5V8

The earlier we get from this point on the longer it will take to any kind of silicon industry and integrated circuits.

(2) A step earlier would be Oleg Vladimirovich Losev and his invention of using solid state electronics for more advanced crystal radios isn't lost and forgotten.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleg_Losev

(3) Last but not least would be Sir Franz Arthur Friedrich Schuster who found that a copper oxide layer on wires has rectification properties that ceases when the wires are cleaned in 1876. With a (great) bit of luck and a deeper investigation he might have discovered a “mass producible/homeade” primitive negative resistance diode and thus jump start solid electronics very, very early.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Schuster

http://www.sparkbangbuzz.com/els/zincosc-el.htm
 
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One of your problems is that once you get much beyond crystal radio components, the silicon (e.g.) needs to be incredibly pure. That's just not doable with, say, 1930s tech.

Could you get stuff 5 years earlier? It wouldn't surprise me. 10? No clue.
20? colour me sceptical.
30? ha, ha.
 
One of your problems is that once you get much beyond crystal radio components, the silicon (e.g.) needs to be incredibly pure. That's just not doable with, say, 1930s tech.

Could you get stuff 5 years earlier? It wouldn't surprise me. 10? No clue.
20? colour me sceptical.
30? ha, ha.

Selenium diodes could have been done anytime after 1890, and then a really smart guy could have done Resistor Diode logic: slow computers are possible.
 
Selenium diodes could have been done anytime after 1890, and then a really smart guy could have done Resistor Diode logic: slow computers are possible.
Looking at Resistor-Diode Logic (which I had not previously heard of), makes it look like it is highly limited in use. No cascading dozens of logic gates (the Wiki article suggested anything beyond 2 was impractical), and there's no way to do a 'Not' function.

So, no, I don't think it would serve for most uses.
 
Looking at Resistor-Diode Logic (which I had not previously heard of), makes it look like it is highly limited in use. No cascading dozens of logic gates (the Wiki article suggested anything beyond 2 was impractical), and there's no way to do a 'Not' function. So, no, I don't think it would serve for most uses.

That why you need the the negative resistance diode. It actually does function as "NOT" element and/or as a signal amplifier.

As for who would come up with such a diode based computer. The answer is rather simple Charles Sanders Peirce. In an 1886 letter, Peirce described how logical operations could be carried out by electrical switching circuits, complete with AND/OR/NOT gates. He also worte an essay discussing Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine.
 
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