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Since I'm in the technology field, I think this story merrits a citation:
It was Bell Labs that patented the germanium transistor in 1947.
The transistor is the fundamental building block of pretty much every electronic piece of equipment built since then. There are millions in the microprocessors that run the computer and monitor you all are working/playing on right now. When this conference call was orchestrated in 1966, switch board operators still manned the telephone routing centers - although it wasn't much longer till that became an antiquated job: Bell Labs again discovered that fiber optics could carry multiple loads of data at the same time, and began installing them in their phone systems in 1970.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Anything that involves the history of electronics is interesting to me. Just imagine if we still had to use vaccum tubes!
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