Today in 1939, William Shockley recorded in his laboratory notebook that it should be possible to replace vacuum tubes with semiconductors. Eight years later, he, Walter Brattain and John Bardeen at AT&T Bell Laboratories successfully tested the point-contact transistor.
[Shockley], Bardeen and Brattain jointly received the Nobel Prize in 1956… While his partners moved on to other topics, he foresaw the commercial potential of transistors as the “nerve cells” of computers. In 1954, Shockley was named director of transistor physics research at Bell, but left Bell Laboratories in 1956 to join Beckman Instruments, Inc. and establish the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, California, for research, development, and production of new transistor and other semiconductor devices.