The transistor turns 60

It's not much to look at — the overriding impression is of several mangled paper clips clumsily soldered onto some chunky scrap metal — but, really, the whole of modern digital life stems from it.

This was the very first transistor, invented at Bell Labs in December 1947. Known as a "point contact transistor", it was first manufactured commercially a few years later in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

From this first transistor arose, eventually, Intel, AMD, Silicon Valley, countless brands of desktop and laptop PCs, the PlayStation 3, the iPhone and more.

Credit: LSI and the Computer History Museum