The transistor became a reality in December of 1947. The Sydney Morning Herald has an article marking this anniversary that you shouldn't miss.

"Creating new ideas, solving problems, inventing things and applying technology in new and novel ways, seems to be a basic human characteristic. One of the things I love about computing . .. is that innovation has been so fundamental to this field. I don't see any slowing down of the rate of innovation. In fact, I continue to see more innovation every day."

Innovations that give us more processing power will spawn many other innovations, Mr Rattner says.

But here's the too obvious example of how transistors have changed things: I'm a guy sitting in Louisiana commenting on an article in The Sydney Morning Herald to a worldwide audience. And I'm not Walter Cronkite.