Fifty years ago this week--shortly after lunch on Dec. 23, 1947--the Digital Revolution was born. It happened on a drizzly Tuesday in New Jersey, when two Bell Labs scientists demonstrated a tiny contraption they had concocted from some strips of gold foil, a chip of semiconducting material and a bent paper clip. As their colleagues watched with a mix of wonder and envy, they showed how their gizmo, which was dubbed a transistor, could take an electric current, amplify it and switch it on and off.
That Digital Revolution is now transforming the end of this century the way the Industrial...