The Transistor's 60th Birthday 185
Apple Acolyte sends in a Forbes piece noting the 60th birthday of the transistor on Dec, 16. For the occasion the AP provides the obligatory Moore's-Law-is-ending, no-it-isn't article. From Forbes: "Sixty years ago, on Dec. 16, 1947, three physicists at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., built the world's first transistor. William Shockley, John Bardeen and William Brattain had been looking for a semiconductor amplifier to take the place of the vacuum tubes that made radios and other electronics so impossibly bulky, hot and power hungry."
history of semiconductor engineering (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The Transisor's Significance (Score:1, Informative)
Re:The hell? (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe you didn't read the article you linked to: "In 1981 he filed a libel suit against the Atlanta Constitution after a reporter called him a "Hitlerite" and compared his racial views to the Nazis. Shockley won the suit"
Re:The hell? (Score:3, Informative)
The fact that you can use a transistor in two modes, as a switch where you basically saturate the device to get minimum 'on' resistance and maximum switching speed vs an analogue mode where you aim for the linear part in the curve is of course totally obvious, but you can actually just use transistors in the 'digital' only mode, in other words trying to minimize as much as possible the time spent in the analog domain where resistance and heat are king & queen. You'll never avoid that completely which is why a digital device built up out of transistors will generate some heat.
To take it one level further, all electronics devices are analog when you look at large quantities of electrons passing through them, they all exhibit capacitance, resistance and inductance but as soon as you take it down to very small quantities of electrons the properties of most components change quite dramatically. These effects are increased when switching faster.
A true 'digital' domain does not exist, except maybe if we ever get to the holy grails of super conductance and single electron switches, or possibly widespread use of photonic devices for computation.
Until then the 'analog' byproducts of using transistors as switches (heat and maximum switching speed) will be with us.
So, as to your 'the transistor actuates levels, not states' you can take it and run with it, if you use a transistor as a switch you ignore the analog portion as much as you can get away with (mostly as a function of switching time) and when you do analog you try to stay in the non-clipping portion of the output curve.
Re:Good 'ole days (Score:3, Informative)
Just for you I've dug you up a picture of what an early model heater would have looked like:
http://www.thevalvepage.com/valvetek/heater/fig4.gif [thevalvepage.com]
and a few more recent types:
http://www.thevalvepage.com/valvetek/heater/fig5.gif [thevalvepage.com]
The two types of tubes that are still in common use either use the tungsten filament as described above (typically for higher power applications) or an indirect system where the heating filament is 'wrapped' by a small tube coated with some oxide, in this case the electron emission is secondary.
Slasdot was labelled 'news for nerds', last I checked, and your remark about the 'hot cathode' being
in contrast to there being no filament at all does not contradict anything I said before.
Also, it's hard to tell one anoymous coward from another.
Have a really nice day.
Re:The hell? (Score:3, Informative)
That kit is almost identical to my 200-in-1 kit. They moved the batteries up topside and added binding posts but that's the one. There is NO BETTER way to teach kids about electronics. The link on radio shack's page should be named "15-in-1 kit". Doesn't look like there's enough to make jack with it. I wonder how many projects are in that book they ship with it.
They must have bought it from Tandy. Nice, they even posted a list of the 200 projects here: http://www.quasarelectronics.com/kit-files/epl/epl200.pdf [quasarelectronics.com] Many of the projects are to teach you about how digital circuits work, like how AND and NOR gates are actually assembled from smaller parts. Sort of like the difference between learning assembly and C++. Sure C++ will get it done faster but if you know assembly you can kick butt and know more about why things work. Too bad they didn't post one or two pages of the kit like oh, #94. An actual, working, AM radio transmitter. Somewhere in that list is a circiut that makes a working intercom. I had a lot of fun with that one.
I believe I have a gift idea for someone I know now. But unfortunately I don't think this is a gift for everyone. I was a major self-starter on these sorts of things, and unless you have some committment to it I don't know, it may end up as parent says, in the clothset after a few weeks.
Some of these projects used almost ALL the components on the kit. There is simply no way to make a kit that allows physical assembly of such complex projects that can match the structure of the schematic. Also, if you wanted to "insert" some circuitry in a fixed position kit, that would be a nightmare. This kit is just a matter of moving a couple wires.
I can't believe how cheap that thing is. I smoked two or three transistors and both chips and had to replace them, and some of those parts were hard to come by. Try today to find a non CMOS RS232 NAND chip...
The 150-in-1 kit was similar in size to this one but was in a wooden box instead of a plastic case. Almost as many parts to use, but not as big of a project book.
Here's another good link: http://www.retrothing.com/2007/01/a_modern_descen.html [retrothing.com] - looks like a rework of the original 150 in 1 kit.
And here's one of the ones I don't like: http://www.laserballs.com/teb.htm [laserballs.com] That was radio shack's upgrade to the 200 in 1 and was as I expected, a miserable flop. Again trying to use a peg board approach to assembly, severely limits flexibility and creativity.
More kits available here: http://www.laserballs.com/tee.htm [laserballs.com]
Re:Good 'ole days (Score:3, Informative)
> Please I urge you, you seem smart but are mysteriously stuck with many misconceptions.
So from being an idiot I now 'seem smart' ? I guess that's an improvement. Who knows where it will lead...
> Perhaps you are self-taught. Commendable, but it's never OK to just assume what you know is gospel truth; investigate and keep learning, always be ready to discard notions proven wrong.
Let me urge you a bit in return: (and btw thanks for the electron micrographs of the lightbulb, that was really nice and interesting stuff.)
Lighten up a bit.
If you really want to teach someone (anyone) then you should try not to come off as a total asshole, snipe attacks, dragging in everything but the kitchen sink to prove yourself, getting yourself worked up into a raging frenzy (by your own admission).
That's not how I remember any of the people that ever taught me.
Especially not whilst being anonymous at the same time, that's simply not nice. Most people don't even bother to read at the level where they can see your writings, they didn't call the 'guest' account 'anonymous coward' for nothing here. I'm out here with my name in full public view, 3 seconds of googling and you know who I am and what I do for a living (and after reading this how I got there) and if you're clever where I live and what my home phone # is.
You're hiding behind a screen of anonymity and sniping at me by poking holes in something that was kept fairly simple on purpose to demonstrate your 'superiority'. But my initial writing was perfectly sufficient given the situation. In other words, you may know more but you are not very tactful, instead of expanding on what I wrote and recognizing that what I wrote was a simplified view of how things work in a tube, if you feel that there is a need for that (but not the be-all-end-all 100% optimized for production situation in a tube) and if you felt so inclined you could have simply expanded on it without making it personal.
This is not the annual ARRL get together, this is
Making things personal whilst being an AC is not a mode of discussion that will make you my friend any time soon.
That sort of attitude tends to impede the flow of information. You come across as a *very* frustrated old guy, that thinks he's due some respect because of his age and knowledge that landed here by accident, and the more you refer to your books from 1962 and your vintage TEK (guess what, I have one too, well maybe not that much of a vintage one, a really neat dual trace, it even had a calibration certificate when I got it but it is most certainly out of 'spec' by now, it was moved several times internationally, but I did give one of the not very portable modular ones to my kid to take apart (it was gone beyond salvage, unfortunately, too many bits were missing)) the more you confirm that image.
By analogy, if I explain to my son how a car engine works, you would come and stand next to me to tell me in a loud and belligerent voice how I know nothing about car engines because I left out the oil pump and am showing my ignorance.
No need to complicate that vision by adding in all the bits and pieces that make it manufacturable at a low price or hyper efficient. We didn't address the silver on the legs either did we ? (I'm sure you will now launch in a tirade of how ignorant I am and that it's not really silver if you still don't get my point).
When explaining a transistor to someone you also would not right away start with vacuum deposition techniq