Introduction to the InfoTech Industry

The technology breakthrough that enabled the modern computer occurred shortly after the end of World War II, when researchers at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey created the first working transistor on December 16, 1947. William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain later received a well-deserved Nobel Prize in Physics for their groundbreaking work.

What started with one transistor has grown at an astonishing rate. Consider the steady evolution of chips from Apple and Intel: In 1978, Intel’s wildly popular 8086 processor contained 29,000 transistors. At the time, this was an immense leap forward in computing, and it opened the door to what would eventually become a vibrant industry that manufactures powerful desktop computers. Fourteen years later, the first Pentium processor was introduced by Intel in 1993, with 3.1 million transistors. Today’s most powerful chips each contain billions of transistors. Worldwide sales of semiconductors were $533 billion in 2023, according to Gartner, down 11% from 2022 after COVID-era demand for work-from-home computers and new entertainment devices cooled off. The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chip was used in high-end Microsoft Surface table as of 2025 and was also designed for artificial intelligence applications. It is capable of running 45 trillion operations per second (TOPS).

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