Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
In 1947, the first transistor, the basic building block for a digital computer, was made using a semiconducting material thought to be ideal for the task: germanium. The idea of using silicon didn’t come up until midway through the next decade, and it wasn’t until 1960 that a thin layer of oxidised silicon, found in today’s most widely used transistors, was added.
Quantum computing, the big hope for solving problems out of reach of today’s computers, is still struggling to reach its own silicon moment. Some of the biggest tech companies have started ramping up their attempts to build a working machine, convinced that the field has finally…