I've had this question for a while, surely every computer or device we have exists thanks to transistors,that allow even very small phones to be as powerful as a computer from 10 years ago, and that can't be even compared to the firs computers that were built.
But imagine a world without integrated circuits and similar miniaturized components, how big would a regular smartphone be? Joking with a friend he said it would have to be as big as Earth to exist and it would use the energy of a sun to work;
is it an exaggeration,or is it true?
Listen to old X-Minus-one classic radio episodes where they could not imagine the impact of the transistor yet, but understood the importance of computing.
They imagined HUGE behemoths for future computers. Many huge computers were made... even late in the tube era, like the Navy's Whirlwind
There was work to make the whole vacuum tube world smaller by making sub miniature tubes... but these really arrived after the transistor started to take a foot hold.
I honestly believe that this was the driving factor at Bell Labs to develop the Field Effect Transistor (which is the semiconductor analog to the triode) under the direction of Shockley. By creating the bipolar junction transistor accidentally... they redirected research in a whole new direction and the rest is history...
The GOAL of making a smaller tube and therefore "computers" smaller was how we got the transistors and integrated circuits we love so much.
hard to say. They were busy miniaturizing vacuum tubes when the transistor came along:
They were sure cute.
And reliable.
6c51h-b vacuum tube found on the old Russian Migs:
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/6S51N-V-6C51H-B-7595-Nuvistor-Triode-Millitary-grade-/201217530252
Same pin-out as the American Nuvistor, "coincidental".
is it an exaggeration,or is it true?
An exaggeration is understating it, no where even close to a few orders of magnitude out.
My colleague explained to his then six year daughter that:-
"When I was your age computers were as big as a house."
To which she replied in wonder:-
"Gosh how big was the keyboard?"
BIG
Yet, not for a tecnical question expecting a precise answer, but instead as a romantic question caused by a marathon of old sci fi books I've read, how big a common phone would be?I'm not asking for specs here, but more for a 《well, that computer could only make operations with deciman numbers and it took an entire house to do it, so a phone doing that and that could be this big". And I'm not asking for the exat comparason, I know it is impossible to compare such different structures.
Just give me an idea; I want to laugh at someone tracking a planet sized phone in his pocket.
Well, you'd probably need a battery the same size your car has to power the thing. A basic phone wouldn't have to be bigger than an old tube radio transmitter/receiver pair. Now if you want to text add a cathode ray tube. Think old oscilloscope. Computing power? Each transistor in the CPU replaced by a tube? Probably 500K if not in the millions, not to mention memory. Now you don't need a car battery. Maybe a battery as big as a car? Truck?
LarryD:
BIG
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSKOhyOWZAA
Also fake.
Well, you can get a rough guess. A modern phone has about 1G transistors in the CPU, another 1G in the RAM, and say 32G in the flash memory (DRAM and Flash both have about 1 transistor per bit.) If you could shrink a tube down to 1 cubic centimeter, you'd have a cube about 32 meters on a side, just for the tubes. Or something about the size of a soccer field, 4.4 meters deep. You can multiply that by relatively small integers to account for the rest of the circuitry, or that maybe dram/flash technology wouldn't work with tubes (although, they had "interesting" memory technologies before they had semiconductor memory, smaller than 1cc/bit.) But "The size of the planet" seems unlikely.
OTOH, you can also consider the fact that one of the driving factor of increasing IC density is reduced power-per-gate. Without some mechanism for COOLING your hypothetical soccer-field-sized computer, you'd be in big trouble, or you'd be spending a lot of extra space doing the cooling.
And then there's the inconvenient fact that the speed of light is finite, and even if you had this huge computer running, it couldn't possibly run at the sort of speeds that modern microcircuits run.
On the third hand, there are some IC-like structures that operate off vacuum-tube-like physics; plasma displays are probably the most familiar, but see also "Field Emitting Display." A couple of megapixels in 1m1m0.1m...
What about - instead of tubes (or perhaps to augment them) - magnetic amplifiers were used?
Mag-amps are one of those interesting "lost techs" of bygone years; IIRC, they slightly pre-date tube amplification - but are still more or less contemporary with tube technology.
Core memory is about the only application I have seen of "mag amp" technology - but it could be purposed to easily make gates (because a mag amp performs a similar role like a tube or transistor). There is old literature (mainly old books - but you can dig up a few scanned PDFs of books and papers from the era) detailing such device and use implementation.
I even seem to recall (?) some recent research into scaling down mag-amp technology for computing purposes, as if the features were etched like transistors are today onto silicon, you could (supposedly) achieve higher densities for parts.
It's one of those fascinating technologies that never took off outside of a few niche applications.
See also "memristors" (not to be confused with "memisters" - a similar technology) and the history of ADALINE/MADALINE and artificial neuron research of the 1960s (which is today being re-visited).
Hi,
If all we still had were valves (toobs), then a few Sci-Fi novelists could have got it right.
I can vaguely remember, with zee grey cells, a number of books I read where there was one master computer that everybody connected to, like big brother.
Each house holder just had a terminal.
Tom..... 
Many years ago I was taken on a school trip to visit a computer at Ferranti's Holborn office in central London**.** This would have been around 1960. It was housed in a very large room and used a huge 30" green screen monitor. All those working on it wore white lab coats. The keyboard was a telex keyboard. All the rest of the equipment was mounted on open Dexion (angle iron) racks. The hard drive was a rotating drum and you could see the heads moving along it. Memory was a small grid of ferrite rings, 9 x 8 IIRC. It worked on a 6 bit byte, so that would have been a huge 12 bytes of memory! All input and output, apart from the screen and keyboard, was by punched paper tape, of which there were many large reels. I presume it was programmed in machine code or assembler, as high level languages weren't invented then.
At 4:00pm we were told that it had to close down, as the power drawn by it would affect London Underground's rush hour services!
Recent reading has shown me that it was the next generation to 'Baby', Manchester University's experimental computer designed by Alan Turing.
55 years later, an AT tiny is far more powerful than that whole large roomful of equipment!