Putting AI in tech milestone perspective

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has been front and center recently, creating great interest in companies like Nvidia, which now ranks among the most valuable companies in the world.

But where does this technology rank among others that have enabled our digital world? The most far-reaching prior innovations were mainly based on electronic devices that enabled increasingly powerful computer and communications systems.

It all started with the transistor, which was invented in 1946 and is the seed invention of our digital electronic age. In various forms, the transistor, which replaced vacuum tube devices, is the solid-state device enabling all electronic systems.

Because of its scalability, reliability and low switching power dissipation, it enabled reliable computing systems that would have been impossible using prior vacuum tube devices.

In the 1960s, the second key invention came: the integrated circuit, which combined multiple interconnected transistors on a silicon chip. This invention, which has grown from a few transistors on a chip to billions today, is the core of practically all current electronic systems.

The desired functionality of the system based on transistor interconnections determines the architecture of the chips.

Powerful computing systems require high-speed interconnections, and the invention of lasers and fiber optics solved this problem. The most widely used lasers developed in the 1970s were semiconductor lasers that enabled data communications by high-data-rate fiber optic-based data transmission.

Optical fibers enable transmitting digital data with high-frequency light pulses over thousands of kilometers. Today, fiber optic communications, along with wireless systems, dominate digital