Interesting video.
-- Good discussion of the transition from tubes.
-- Go Arlington, Virginia!
-- Nice video of Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley at work (Shockley does seem a bit off to the side).
Posts
An Unintended Post-Mortem
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Many of us wind up in a similar situation, I'm sure: we impulse buy at
hamfests—great plans for some big old currently non-working piece of
gear—and then...
50 minutes ago
Either by coincidence or because YouTube's algorithm reads the Soldersmoke blog too, this Philco PR video just showed up in my Recommended list:
ReplyDeletehttps://youtu.be/BillR7xtTxc
Philco had its own transistor manufacturing facility, and this video shows that operation. It was made in 1957 (an excellent year--I was born in November), and it was after July because they mention the IGY. They speak mostly of germanium, so maybe this was just before silicon took off as the semiconductor-of-choice.
A few things really stood out for me. The first was that Philco's idea of "clean" (as in "cleanroom") was pretty primitive. No positive-pressure rooms, no hair bonnets or face masks, and no sticky floor mats.
The other thing that stood out was just how sappy and unsophisticated documentaries of that era were. This one was like the 16mm films they used to show us in grade school in the 1960s (mostly made in the 50s). Pretty nostalgic, and I'm not positive the slick whiz-bang productions of today are one-hundred percent better. 73, Todd K7TFC
That was also the year I bought my first transistor, a GE 2N107 in a metal TO-5 can. You wouldn't pay 2 cents for one now, except for history/nostalgia. Germanium, of course. So leaky you surely did not want to add any bias current. Frequency cutoff (common emitter) about 15 KILOhertz. (There was talk of transistors for RF, maybe for the military!) It cost me $19.95 which was a lot of money. Shortly afterwards TI, over in Dallas, started giving bags of reject transistors to my high school (in Fort Worth) for us to play with.
ReplyDelete73, Bob W, WA9D