The first transistor was about half an inch high. That's mammoth by today's standards, when 7 million transistors can fit on a single computer chip. It was nevertheless an amazing piece of technology.
You know the “just add a transistor” drill by now: a performance or functionality requirement comes up that you can’t support entirely using the blocks built into your favorite mixed-signal ...
If you got your start in electronics sometime after 1980 your first project might well have been to light up an LED. Microcontroller projects often light up an LED, too, and a blinking LED is ...