The IBM 1401 restoration team found some corroded germanium transistors that seemed to show memristor-like behavior: http://ibm-1401.info/GermaniumAlloy.html#CommentsGarner (scroll to the p.s.) If anyone can explain this behavior, they would be grateful.
To change topic, progress on memristors seems painfully slow. In comparison, it took just 10 years from the invention of the transistor until IBM's president forced the company to give up tubes and switch to transistors. And it was just 4 years from the invention of the first IC until NASA decided to use them in the Apollo Guidance Computer and landed them on the moon a few years later.
> To change topic, progress on memristors seems painfully slow.
I think that's a little unfair. They were first shown just 7 years ago, and have already been used to build (extremely) simple neural networks.
Transistors took ~6 years before they were sold in commercial products, and you can already buy a memristor on a chip.
When transistors were invented, ENIAC was around and had ~18,000 vacuum tubes, and was the kind of thing governments built. In 2008 you could wander into a shop and pick up something like this: http://ark.intel.com/products/37147 which has 730 million transistors.
I think it's understandable that it'll take a bit longer for memristors to overtake transistor based processors.
To change topic, progress on memristors seems painfully slow. In comparison, it took just 10 years from the invention of the transistor until IBM's president forced the company to give up tubes and switch to transistors. And it was just 4 years from the invention of the first IC until NASA decided to use them in the Apollo Guidance Computer and landed them on the moon a few years later.