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Was the "Mini" the first fully transistorised version of modern computer without any old vaccum tubes?
Was the proliferation in number of computers in business,industry and government areas in USA due to birth of these transistorised computers.Was the reduction in prices of computers also due only to birth of transistorised computers? Was the birth of "high level computer languages" also only due to birth of transistorised computers? An accurate and very brief reply will be appreciated.
The first minicomputer most of us knew about was the DEC PDP8 which was a transistorised computer of the 1960s. By the end of the 1960s they used TTL family integrated circuits, and even some Large Scale Integration (LSI) where the CPU was made up of two or three LSI chips. Some of the well known US brands were DEC, Data General and Wang and of course IBM. These had reasonable processing power, typically used core memory (which has the distinction of being non volatile) and vectored interrupts etc that made I/O processing strong. They were often used for industrial control applications. There is no doubt in my mind these were the first computers seen by most people at the time. There were some smaller mainframes also known as minicomputers. This style of computer is called mid range nowadays, and Sun Microsystems is one of the producers.
Edit later
I think that high level languages like Fortran and Basic were an inevitable outcome of having enough memory to compile libraries. If you wrote in assembler and developed a good collection of routines, it was an obvious step to make these modular and call them by statements - an extension of macros even.
The link below has more detail.
hand making vacuum tubes Part 1