Ray Blanco, The Daily Reckoning June 29, 2015Do you like your iPhone? Today, you are walking with the equivalent of what was supercomputer not too long ago — in your pocket. The foundation for the modern semiconductor industry got its start in the late 1940s and 1950s. Electronics up until then were dependent on vacuum tubes. These weren’t, to say the least, very easy to miniaturize. But we did try to use them. In 1946, the U.S. government built the first general-purpose electronic computer. It was called ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) and contained over 17,000 vacuum tubes, along...
