Electronics: Past, Present, and Future

Abstract

What is electronics? Once we associated electronics with vacuum tubes, but vacuum tubes are almost obsolete. Perhaps electronics is semiconductor devices. But then, what of magnetic cores and bubbles and liquid crystals? I think that electronics has really come to mean all electrical devices for communication, information processing, and control. This would include pre-vacuum-tube devices such as the electric telegraph, which replaced such light-wave communication as semaphore telegraphs, signal flags, and heliographs. It would include the telephone.

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