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There is something about history of computer hardware and ICs that confuses me - a jump from wardrobe dimensions of last generation of transistor computers to ICs which were so small as "the size of a little fingernail" (The Story of the Intel® 4004). I cannot understand why it had to be so small at the peak of the "any miniaturisation is success" era.

So this leads me to my question: were there any non microscopic integrated circuits? By that I mean something that would either not be fabricated with photolithography process or dimensions significantly larger than 10 µm (1971)?

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    \$\begingroup\$ ti.com/corp/docs/kilbyctr/jackbuilt.shtml \$\endgroup\$
    – John D
    Commented Apr 25, 2018 at 22:51
  • \$\begingroup\$ What makes you think that computers instantly jumped from wardrobe-sized machines to modern laptops? Moore's law says that the number of transistors doubles every 2 years, so the growth is more of a smooth transition than a instant jump. Just look at this 1997 laptop for something in-between the two sizes: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/31/… \$\endgroup\$
    – dpdt
    Commented Apr 25, 2018 at 23:04
  • \$\begingroup\$ I don't. But they did jumped from ~1000 transistors packed in large boxes to nail size 2400 components (talking about CPUs). Which is huge deal. \$\endgroup\$
    – Miloš Đakonović
    Commented Apr 25, 2018 at 23:08
  • \$\begingroup\$ These? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_integrated_circuit \$\endgroup\$
    – Janka
    Commented Apr 25, 2018 at 23:16
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    \$\begingroup\$ What about the part where they were made of ICs but the whole CPU didn't fit on one IC? The PDP 11/40 is roughly suitcase sized instead of wardrobe sized (but when you add on tape drives, etc, it gets closer to wardrobe sized) \$\endgroup\$
    – Criticizing Israel not allowed
    Commented Apr 26, 2018 at 3:11

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The computer controlling the wing-pivoting of the F-15, implementing sensors and aerodynamic computations, needed 10 to 20 ICs about 1970.

The people at Fairchild used standard reflex camera dual-lenses in their first optical lithography; resolution was about 50 microns (2 mils, or 0.002 inches).

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Thanks, would that be something like 7400 series - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7400_series ? \$\endgroup\$
    – Miloš Đakonović
    Commented Apr 26, 2018 at 6:13
  • \$\begingroup\$ The early Fairchild devices were RTL, resistor-transistor-logic. The moon-landers used only uL914 dual NOR gates. No flipflops. \$\endgroup\$
    – analogsystemsrf
    Commented Apr 26, 2018 at 16:58
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As John points out in his comment, the first transistor was already pretty small but not microscopic. After that was invented, computer processors would not have been integrated into a single chip until many years later. Between those two points, you have a varying amount of integration with a single computer being made up of many different IC's. The basic IC's would have been inverters/nands/nors and amplifiers on single chips all wired together to make up the entire computer.

In a way, you're right though, microprocessors made a significant jump in miniturization vs mainframes because they were addressing a different market. You could think of mainframes being that era's equivalent of a server computer and the original microprocessor being that era's equivalent of a microcontroller. While they're both computer brains, their functions are designed for completely different applications.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_hardware_(1960s%E2%80%93present)

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The first integrated circuits were in vacuum tubes, and definitely bigger than 10um, and definitely not lithographic.

http://www.computerhistory.org/siliconengine/timeline/

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