The British Motor Corp. launched a very innovative small car, the Morris Mini. It looked like a box on wheels, but in fact it has been carefully designed to be both practical and cost-effective. By placing the four small wheels at the corners and mounting the engine sideways, Issigonis (the designer) has created a surprising amount of space inside.

The transistor, invented in 1948, is a solid-state device for controlling electrical signals. Its invention launched the era of modern electronics, of pocket calculators and transistor radios. In late 1959 and early 1960, two physicists working separately devised integrated circuits. The integrated circuit is an assembly of circuit elements, including transistors, diodes, capacitors, and resistors etched on a silicon wafer. The physicists who invented the integrated circuit were Jack Kilby, an employee of Texas Instruments, and Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor. Noyce went on to become a founder of Intel Corporation, the leading maker of microprocessors, or miniaturized integrated circuits used in a number of electronic products. The electronic product most affected by the advent of the integrated circuit was the computer. Microprocessors made possible the personal desktop computers of the 1970s, smaller laptop computers of the 1980s, and even smaller notebook computers in the 1990s. By increasing the number of transistors on a microprocessor, it has become possible to create small computers of incredible power far more powerful in fact than the original computers that filled whole rooms with their vacuum tubes.