Remembering Electronic Designs

May 9, 2022

As Electronic Design celebrates its 70th year, we’re creating an assortment of special article series that look back at how our industry has evolved over the past seven decades.

William G. Wong

Related To: Electronic Design

This article is part of Electronic Design's 70th Anniversary series.

At 70 years, Electronic Design has been around longer than I have, although I’m close. We plan on being around for another 70. If the amount of change in just our industry is any indication of what’s coming up, then we’re in for a whirlwind ride. Even 70 years ago, electronics had changed the world, doing things that were never possible before.

Usually, my Lab Bench articles look at a new dev kit or product. This time, though, I wanted to highlight some of the online and print articles that are looking back and forward. These include:

You can always leave comments online for these articles. However, with the “What Computer Had the Biggest Impact on You?” series, you can provide additional feedback, which I’ve turned into slideshows based on your input.

The “Series: Then and Now” is a collection of articles that are appearing in each print issue of Electronic Design. These cover a very large swath on some target topic like processor technology.

Finally, there’s the Do You Recognize These? Series, where I provide a hint and a close-up image about a technology or product. I follow up with the full image and a description. Sometimes I give a little history, since most of these are items I’ve worked with.

It’s worth putting our latest technology into context. Take the transistor radio, which would have been around when Electronic Design started publication (Fig. 1). It had about half-a-dozen individual transistors. It ran off a 9-V battery. We now have smartphones that have multiple chips with transistor counts in the millions using 5-nm silicon technology. They have foldable, hi-res screens plus multiple hi-res cameras that can capture and store video internally.

1. Transistor radios in the 1950s had half-a-dozen transistors (left). The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip has a folding AMOLED screen with 2636 × 1080 resolution and a 64-bit, 8-core system-on-chip with gigabytes of storage (right). (Courtesy of Joe Haupt from USA (left), and Samsung (right))

Think of where we would be without early chips like the NE555 timer. We’ve had many Ideas for Design articles based on this part alone.

Anyone remember the IMSAI 8080 (Fig. 2) with 8-in. floppy disks used in the movie WarGames? Its S-100 bus was used in dozens of pre-IBM PC platforms.