Microprocessors are essential to many of the products we use every day such as televisions, cars, radios, home appliances, and, of course, computers. Transistors are the main components of microprocessors.

At their most basic level, transistors may seem simple. But their development actually required many years of painstaking research. Before transistors, computers relied on slow, inefficient vacuum tubes and mechanical switches to process information. In 1958, engineers (one of them Intel co-founder Robert Noyce) managed to put two transistors onto a silicon crystal and create the first integrated circuit, which led to the microprocessor.