I know that nowadays tantalum is very common in computer components, specifically capacitors, due to its desirable electrical properties. I'm curious when it was first used specifically in the context of computing, and for what purpose.
Bonus: did the computer spur the use of tantalum (that is, was tantalum useless before computers took off) or were computer engineers looking for something that had desirable properties and found that tantalum, being used elsewhere, would do the job?
This question is migrated from retro-computing here.
Some research I've done tells me that Bell Labs required a new type of capacitor for their new transistor, but it was Sprague Electric who made them into something commercially viable somewhere around 1956. However, I don't know when the merger of the tantalum cap and the computer happened, which is what I'm looking for.
Best Answer
There's a fair bit of history and references in the Wikipedia article, so it's worth exploring those.
We were certainly using tantalum capacitors in industrial electronics long before the personal computer was available, and I'm sure it was used in military electronics as well.
Very early (pre-IBM, eg. S-100) desktop computers probably had a few tantalum caps in them, there appears to be one in this photo of a static RAM board (the blue input cap for the local linear voltage regulator), but most of the bypass caps appear to be ceramic. They would have been sold in the mid-to-late 1970s.