“So often,” says Ian Ross, who worked in Jack Morton’s department at Bell Labs doing transistor development in the 1950s, “the original concept of what an innovation will do”—the replacement of the vacuum tube, in this case—“frequently turns out not to be the major impact.”1 The transistor’s greatest value was not as a replacement for the old but a

Tiny transistors replaced bulky vacuum tubes, and cheap standardized components replaced expensive custom parts, giving rise to relatively inexpensive minicomputers that could fit beside a desk.