What if the computer is never invented?

To never have computers invented at all would require some huge butterflies, IMO. Technological progress isn't necessarily a straight line, so it's not a given that computers "as we know them", so to speak, would always exist. But I do think it's a given that, as time goes on and technology evolves in any form, machines used for increasingly complex calculations will come into existence. That said, though, if no such machines do come into existence, the pace of technological progress will be much much slower. Not only due to those complex calculations, that'll take longer to solve, but the inability to communicate as quickly as we can with computers.
In the Fallout Universe the transistor is not invented untill a decade before the great war. Technology in the Fallout Universe never entered the period of miniaturization that digital computers and electronics experienced. Instead they rely more on vacumm tubes. Creating a large divergence between the Fallout ATL and OTL.
http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Divergence
http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Transistor

You might want to google Fallout electronics to see how bulky it is.
 
Anacom2.jpg

Picture of my wife's grandfather, Edwin Harder, with Westinghouse's Anacom; their first general purpose analog computer, which he was the project lead for when it was built 1946 - 1948. Excerpt from an interview he once gave, "... electrical transients analyzer with a rotating synchronous switch. It's driven by a synchronous motor, and has handles with which adjust the closing time each cycle. It goes around ten times a second. So you can set up a transient, repeat it ten times a second and display the result on a cathode-ray oscillograph. That was the way the Anacom worked."

The first digital computers got developed within 5 years after that. Though the Anacom was still used up to 1990.
 
No microchips is going to be difficult, because they're a natural progression of the transistor, so what you really have to do is kill off solid-state technology altogether.
You'll still probably end up with some degree of miniaturization even without solid state. Vacuum tube microelectronics are something that exists, and are what the tube could have evolved into if the transistor hadn't come along. Granted I doubt they'd even be seen outside of the government and big business, and maybe they wouldn't have been invented by this point in the ATL, but tubes would get smaller and better. Even if they didn't though capacitors would which will remove some size constraints.
 
Even though the transistor did not enter the world scene until 1947, the Germans had invented it a decade or so earlier. They did little with it because they thought the vacuum tube would be more reliable in military applications. So, the transistor does not get butterflied away. The step to photographically reduce electronic components on to silicon chips may not have been an obvious, foregone conclusion. The space race created the need for such a chip, not the consumer electronics industry. Without the microchip, computers remain large devices, in the domains of governments, universities and large corporations. Smaller corporations had been known to fold over the wrong choice of computer system. For all practical purposes, such a scenario is one in which the personal computer is never invented.
 
Even though the transistor did not enter the world scene until 1947, the Germans had invented it a decade or so earlier. They did little with it because they thought the vacuum tube would be more reliable in military applications. So, the transistor does not get butterflied away. The step to photographically reduce electronic components on to silicon chips may not have been an obvious, foregone conclusion. The space race created the need for such a chip, not the consumer electronics industry. Without the microchip, computers remain large devices, in the domains of governments, universities and large corporations. Smaller corporations had been known to fold over the wrong choice of computer system. For all practical purposes, such a scenario is one in which the personal computer is never invented.

This is what I am toying with, computing remains the domain of massive machines for higher order usages, an industrial magnitude to it, the consumer electronics revolution never gets beyond the transistor radio or expensive niche devices. The consumer side looks more like Minitel, bought access to central networks and systems, nothing portable, not used beyond the utility model.
 
Microchips took a tremendous amount of government-sponsored work earmarked for missiles. Butterfly away the space race, and you can freeze electronics at the transistor level for quite some time. Computers would remain the mainframe devices of the sixties for a long time.
For some time, but not forever. People started working on ICs (Integrated Circuits) almost as soon as transistors came on the scene.
 
The transistor is such an obvious development in electrical engineering that I really don't see a way around them. You have a large amount of people looking for something like this and as history shows it was thought up by multiple people seperately. that indicates that it is an event you simply cannot handwave away by editing a single or even multiple events but that it is a logical development path that will happen at some point.
 
Because Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, USN found a dead insect in the machine and it was fouling things up or something like that.

Heard a interview of her when she retired for the last time. She said the term 'bug' was already in use by radar techs and engineers, who her Dept worked with. She said they pinned the moth to a card with a caption about 'bug found' or something similar.
 
I work in high volume supply chain. Reading this thread and imagining my job without computer makes me shudder.
I might have nightmares tonight and it's all your fault.
 
In the Fallout Universe the transistor is not invented untill a decade before the great war. Technology in the Fallout Universe never entered the period of miniaturization that digital computers and electronics experienced. Instead they rely more on vacumm tubes. Creating a large divergence between the Fallout ATL and OTL.
http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Divergence
http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Transistor

You might want to google Fallout electronics to see how bulky it is.

I mean yeah, but I think that still fits in with what I said. Large, bulky computers are still computers. Just not, like I said, "computers as we know them."
 
The space race created the need for such a chip, not the consumer electronics industry. Without the microchip, computers remain large devices, in the domains of governments, universities and large corporations

Not exactly. Fairchild Semiconductor was the key

In 1958, Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments invented the integrated circuit, now known universally as the IC.
Kilby’s work, however important as it was, could arguably be said to be non-exclusive in terms of first authorship of the integrated circuit.

In early 1959, Robert Noyce, an engineer at Fairchild Semiconductor, also developed an IC concept

The nucleus of Noyce’s concept was actually closer to the concept of today’s ICs, as it used inter-connecting metal trace layers between transistors and resistors.
Kilby’s IC, by contrast, used bond wires.

As might be expected from such differences between two key inventions, so closely timed in their origination, there was no instant consensus on the true "IC inventor".

Subsequent patent fights between the two inventor’s companies persisted into the 1960s


The Planar Process

In general parallel with the Noyce’s early IC developments, Jean Hoerni (also of Fairchild Semiconductor) had been working on means to protect and stabilize silicon
diode and transistor characteristics. Until that time, the junctions of all mesa process devices were essentially left exposed. This was a serious limitation of the mesa process.
The mesa process is so-named because the areas surrounding the central base-emitter regions are etched away, thus leaving this area exposed on a plateau, or mesa. In practice,this factor makes a semiconductor so constructed susceptible to contaminants, and as a result, inherently less stable.

This was the fatal flaw that Hoerni’s invention addressed.
Hoerni’s solution to the problem was to re-arrange the transistor geometry into a flat, or planar surface, thus giving the new process its name. However,
the important distinction in terms of device protection is that within the planar process the otherwise exposed regions are left covered with silicon dioxide. This feature reduced the device sensitivity to contaminants; making a much better, more stable transistor or IC.
With the arrangement of the device terminals on a planar surface, Hoerni’s invention was also directly amenable to the flat metal conducting traces that were intrinsic to Noyce’s IC invention. Furthermore, the planar process required no additional process steps in its implementation, so it made the higher performance economical as well. As time has now shown, the development of the planar process was another key semiconductor invention.

At a time in the early 1960s shortly after the invention of the planar process, the three key developments had been made. They were the (silicon) transistor itself, the IC, and the planar process. The stage was now set for important solid-state developments in op amps.
This was to take place in three stages. First, there would be discrete transistor and modular op amp versions, second there would be hybrid op amps, which could be produced in a couple of ways. One hybrid method utilized discrete transistors in chip form(s), interconnected to form an op amp; another was a specially matched transistor pair combined with an IC op amp for improved performance, and thirdly, the op amp finally became a complete, integral, dedicated IC— the IC op amp.

in 1960 GAP/R was a transitioning company, and while they maintained the vacuum tube op amp line for some time, they stayed away from solid-state op amps until quality silicon transistors could be found. GAP/R began to introduce solid-state op amps in the early 1960's. George Philbrick was simply unwilling to produce germanium transistor solid-state op amps, and he also had specific ideas about the optimum amplifier topology that could be used.

The new solid-state op amps were to transition power supply and signal range standards from ±300V/±100V down to ±15V/±10V, a standard that still exists today. And of course, new packaging for the op amps was to emerge, in several forms.
The GAP/R P65, shown above in Figure H-7, was a general purpose device. It was designed by Alan Pearlman, with later revisions by Bob Malter, and was produced from 1961 through 1971.
Another GAP/R solid-state op amp was the P45, designed by Bob Pease,and was introduced in 1963. The edge connector card package was used with the P45 and P65, as well as many other GAP/R solid-state amplifiers.

In 1962 Alan Pearlman and partner Roger R. (Tim) Noble formed their own Boston area company, Nexus Research Laboratory, Inc.
Nexus competed with both GAP/R and Burr-Brown in the growing solid-state op amp field. The Nexus mission was to deliver solid-state op amps to customers for printed

circuit board mounting, thus the Nexus designs used a rectangular, potted module package. They were so popular that they influenced GAP/R to follow suit with modular designs of their own.


Birth of the Monolithic IC Op Amp

The first generally recognized monolithic IC op amp was from Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation, the μA702. The μA702 was designed by a young engineer,Robert J. (Bob) Widlar. As will be seen, Bob Widlar was a man who was shortly to make an indelible mark on the IC world. But, his 1963 μA702 didn’t exactly take the world by
storm. It wasn't well received, due to quirky characteristics— odd supply voltages, low input/output swings, low gain, etc. Nevertheless, despite these shortcomings, the μA702 established some important IC design trends. As pioneered by Bob Widlar, these concepts were to carry over to future op amps). In fact, they are standard
linear IC design concepts yet today.
The A709

Not long after the μA702 a major IC op amp landmark came about, specifically the introduction of another Bob Widlar op amp for Fairchild in 1965, the μA709, The 7091 improved markedly on the 702
The LM101

Not content to rest on his 702 and 709 laurels, Bob Widlar moved on to another company, National Semiconductor Corporation (NSC). His next IC op amp design, the LM101, was introduced in 1967 (see Reference 4). This began a second IC op amp generation (the 709 is generally regarded as the first generation of IC op amps)

https://pearl-hifi.com/06_Lit_Archi..._W/Op_Amp_History_and_Refs/Op_Amp_History.pdf

Westinghouse was doing their line of circuit for the military, while the above were replacing existing vacuum tube comparitor circuits in business and research applications.
Now Fairchild Semiconductor made good money off of military contracts, that wasn't their focus, despite big sales for the B-70 and Minuteman missile guidance systems.

Robert Noyce wanted to be the major player in silicon based transistors, by doing it better and cheaper than anyone else. in two years, went from 12 to 12,000 employees, being one of the few semiconductor companies to be running in the black. At that point, Fairchild got contracts with NASA
 
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