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."
The hell? (Score:5, Funny)
This post is at least 5 minutes old and no comments?
Either no one cares about the poor transistor, or you've all gotten lives.
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Anybody who has held a soldering iron and done something digital with single transistors please raise your hand ? Vacuum tubes ? Relays ?
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Anybody who has held a soldering iron and done something digital with single transistors please raise your hand ? Vacuum tubes ? Relays ?
One hand raised way up here.
Fanciest thing I ever did was a capacitance measuring device. Mostly used op-amps though IIRC there was a single discrete BJT in it as well. It was a really wierd device in the end though. You had to connect the leads of the capacitor and press a start button for the device to start measuring it. The idea was to use a constant current source to charge the capacitor up to a set voltage. So with voltage and charging current being constant, the capacitance value was proportional
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In between I worked on organic transistors, normal silicon transistors, high-k devices.. you name it.
Re:The hell? (Score:4, Funny)
It was all part of an electronics toy set called "Electronic Engineering", where you could build various gadgets by connecting components in predefined ways. Very cool, but unfortunately I was far too young to understand what I was doing. Still it did capture my attention and speed me on the road to geekdom.
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You did, did you? Well, I made analog circuits with single NAND gates
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They came with booklets that had 150 (o
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Radio Shack [radioshack.com]
Amazon [amazon.com]
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I'm in Sweden, and didn't find anything in Swedish shops, and I didn't think of ordering abroad over the Web. Stupid of me. I'll look into this a bit more next time it's time for gifts. Thanks!
From the pictures I get the impression that in these kits the components are in fixed places, and you connect them with wires crisscrossing the kit. But I'm not sure because the pictures aren't very big. My childhood ki
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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 20
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I mod guitar amps, and am working on building my first one, which will be all tube (5y3 rectifier tube, 12at7 and 12ax7 preamp tubes, and 6v6 output tubes.)
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Almost all of my digital electronics projects include at least one discrete transistor. Quite often, you need an open collector/open drain output from a chip, but it doesn't actually provide one - a single mosfet will do the job (maybe two if you need it to not be inverted). Very often you need to switch
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Transistors? Yes. Relays? Not soldered, but ISTR there were some digital-logic projects that used the relay in Radio Shack's 150-in-1 kit. Tubes? Not digital, but I've gotten some old radios running again. (One only needed a couple of tubes replaced, but I recapped another one.)
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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'
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Anything less will cause the transistor to end up below the 'on' state, and will cause the parasitic capacitor that is present in every transistor BE junction to charge up a
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ECL requires quite a bit more than just one transistor iirc... I could be wrong, but I really don't think so.
Just from memory I think that's at least two transistors in push pull and a symmetrical power supply + a bunch of resistors to get things set up 'just so'.
Please enlighten me oh anonymous expert...
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We're using vacuum tube-based browsers, and they post slooowwww.
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So You've Won Your Nobel Prize- Now What? (Score:2, Offtopic)
While this may be true, how many other racist Nobel laureates of that era can you name? How many left such a bad aftertaste in the mouth of history? Maybe a lot of them held those beliefs in private, but Shockley became more famous for his racism
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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"
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On another note, the mathematics he developed for the P-N junction also a
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Maybe you didn't either, because the sentence just prior to the one you quoted is However, Shockley's views about the genetic superiority of whites over blacks brought the Repository for Germinal Choice notable negative publicity and discouraged other Nobel Prize winners from donating sperm.
Yes, speaking statistically based upon the data he uncovered he concluded that target group 'A' was genetically superior as a whole in comparison with target group 'B'.
If we were talking German Shepards versus Labrador Retrievers would that make his study less reprehensible? Ancient Azteks versus Ancient Egyptians? Holstein versus Guernsey cows?
The point of the matter is that because it is a politically and emotionally charged topic, and DarkOx pointed it out [slashdot.org], it is not possible to have a rational dis
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So which "race" is the smartest? The kindest? The fastest? The most beautiful?
If you can't answer even one of those questions with statistical certainty, please shut up.
On second thought, do you even have a
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I only hope I live to see the day where it's acknowledged that physiologically, mentally, emotionally as well as culturally Whites (Canadian, American, European), Blacks (African, islanders), Asians, Indians, Natives, etc. are all different, as a side note women and men differ along the same lines.
So which "race" is the smartest? The kindest? The fastest? The most beautiful?
If you can't answer even one of those questions with statistical certainty, please shut up.
Did I mention superiority? No, I said races and sexes are different. Since we're going from one ridiculous extreme to the other; are you inferring then that all races and both sexes are identical in every aspect?
On second thought, do you even have a definition of race that doesn't depend on where a person's ancestors lived 200 years ago?
No, you're the only one who knows the real truth. Oh, but did you notice where I said "culturally"? Do you suppose there's a slight difference in culture between Caucasians who've been in Canada for the past few decades and those who live in, say, France or Spain?
Furthermore I was differentiat
Re:The hell? (Score:5, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley#Beliefs_about_populations_and_genetics [wikipedia.org]
It's sad that when someone applies scientific principles to a politically charged situation they're framed as a bigot.
It is true that unskilled, poor, unintelligent people have more children. They simply have more time on their hands and less grasp of the consequences children will have on their lifestyle and they tend to have less access (voluntarily or financially) to proper modern birth control methods and hey, when you've got a lot of time on your hand sex is a great passtime!
Shockley did conclude through his research that this happens more with black families than with whites, however he proposed that all people with sub-100 IQs (no further qualification) should be paid for voluntary sterilization.
His ideas while radical at the time have been tossed around for decades. It is widely held that uneducated, unskilled people who do either no or menial labour greatly increase the chances that their children will do much of the same later in life. It's why ghetto-style atmospheres tend to be cyclical and highly self-supporting. It's also why people who "escape" from that life are notable exceptions.
The man was a scientist and one who contributed one of the most pivotal pieces of our way of life to date. That's not something that should be undermined by a piece of socio-politically charged research that he did besides.
Then again there's almost always two sides to every major scientific discovery. Einstein gave us atomic energy but he also gave us atomic weapons (for which I understand he was forever mournful). Shockley gave us something that revolutionized the way we live, work and play but he also inadvertently gave us spam and script kiddies and phishing and 419 scams and and and ... :P
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Oh come on, his views are despicable. It's the standard nerd whine that other people get more sex than nerds.
Funny, I don't recall him mentioning anything to do with sex, and he was married with more than one child so he's obviously copulated with a member of the opposite sex; presumably more than once.
But rather than staying in the lab or learning to talk to people in bars (which is actually not that hard if you really are above average intelligence),
Speaking of stupid people, let's introduce alcohol to the situation and instead we get stupid, drunk, inhibitions-diminished desperate people instead! Great fun!
he wants to sterilize the competition from the 'dumb' people. Dumb being naturally defined as 'does poorly on IQ tests', which is sort of convenient for people like Shockley who did very well indeed on them.
An IQ test just happens to be a standardized way of measuring intelligence. Sure, lots of these people can plow fields or perform other monotonous tas
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The whole point of eugenics is the idea that stupid (and therefore evolutionarily unfit) people breed faster than smart and (therefore evolutionarily fit) ones. Which from a Darwinian point of view is nonsense. Breeding means you're evolutionarily fit, passing IQ tests or learning Klingon or Vi doesn't. The right people are breeding, by definition. Elitist nerds aren't breeding, but that's not a problem with evolution, just for them.
Wow do you ever have a fixation with nerds. He wasn't talking about nerds, he was talking about successful intelligent people who come in many forms including business men/women, engineers, scientists, and any of a slew of other professional types.
Your fixation with picking up drunk chicks in a bar seems to tell me that you're on the cusp of the lower class which makes you border on the people he's talking about so I can understand why you'd take his research so personally.
As for evolutionary fitness
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I don't know if Shockley was a racist. I do
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Wow...sounds like Idiocracy [imdb.com] may have hit a little too close to home for you.
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If you can't figure it out, count it... 16/12/48 = 1 year, 16/12/49 = 2 years, 16/12/50 = 3 years, 16/12/51 = 4 years, 16/12/52 = 5 years, 16/12/53 = 6 years, 16/12/54 = 7 years, 16/12/55 = 8 years, 16/12/56 = 9 years, 16/12/57 = 10 years. Keep going if you still don't think that it was 60 years ago today (though you may need to take your shoes off).
Allow me to simplify starting with your premise to satisfy the nay sayers who'll still insist that it's wrong and that we proles just can't do math;
As every audiophile knows... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:As every audiophile knows... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:As every audiophile knows... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is actually related to one of the major reasons: Power Handling. Vacuum tubes are still used for High Power transmitter amplifiers, much greater than 1kw.
Also: The "Virtual Tube" DSP amps do not sound the same, regardless of what a tone-deaf Electrical Engineer says. Musicians are "Audiophiles" in the derogatory sense you intend, although they usually audiophiles in the true sense of being lovers of sound and music. They may not know EE, but that doesn't mean they don't know anything. Skilled musicians DO know music, and there is a reason they prefer tube amps for Guitars, Bass, etc.
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Every audiophile knows... (Score:2)
Would you like an oxygen-free, 99.999% pure woven copper blindfold and gold-plated cigarette?
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Copper? Don't make me laugh. Every audiophool knows that you need silver. And not just any silver, but pure isotope 109 silver (its higher density makes the sound flow better).
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That's more likely because the DSP wasn't programmed properly. A transistor *should* in theory be able to replicate any sound within its frequency range. My guess is that the DSPs aren't correctly accounting for distortions caused by the tubes.
On the other hand, "pro sound" tends to shy away from tube amps these days, because transistor amps have gotten good enough not to be noticeably differen
Re:As every audiophile knows... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, and that reason is marketing. Pure, simple, intensive marketing. Lots and lots of marketing being fed to them throughout their life. Fender and Gibson make the best guitars, Marshal makes the best amps and tubes are better than solid state amps. That's what is constantly being fed to them through implicit and explicit marketing campaigns. Yet, no one can rationally explain why are they better than the others, besides the huge price tag that comes attached to those products and the fact that "OMG my guitar hero uses one of those so it must be excellent.
On the other hand, Brian May made his career playing a guitar that was made from wood taken from a fireplace and some bike parts and it sounds better than any 2.5k euro guitars out there. Makes you think. Or at least it should.
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Same as for turntable people (Score:2)
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Re:As every tube technician knows... (Score:2)
(...)and ability to dimly illuminate the immediate area, not to mention a way to visually detect dead units
In the world of vacuum tube failure modes, filament burnout isn't very high on the list. One exception is series-string filament setups (most TVs, some radios) where production variances in heaters inevitably cause one or more tubes to experience an excessive voltage drop. Excessive voltage can considerably shorten heater life. Problem is, like series-string Christmas lights - when one heater burns out, the whole string (often every tube in the chassis except for the rectifier) goes dark. Interestingly en
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However, there's one place where tubes win out over transistors, as another poster stated: high-voltage amplifiers. Tubes can deal with much more power. More importantly, though (at least sometimes), is that when you use a tube amp, you're almost always stepping down the voltage going to the output. This drastically reduces the chance of
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But you have to know all the characteristics of something to mimic it correctly. It's sort of comparable human characters in CGI: they are difficult to "get right" not because we don't have the ability to control CGI enough, but rather because nobody knows how to program the subtleties needed to fool the viewer that they are looking at actual footage of a
Re:As every camper knows... (Score:3, Interesting)
There's a taste for everything, but there's no denying that transistors make sound that's closer to the original, same as a hotel room is closer to the room where you (OK, most people...) sleep at home.
Actually, one of the tube amplifiers biggest shortcomings, its high distortion, is one of the reasons why tubes are still used for a niche application: guitar amplifiers. The distortion caused by the tubes has
Re:As every camper knows... (Score:5, Funny)
Right up until the next morning when you wish you had a hot shower and room service.
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a nice, warm-sounding amplifier is not something made of transistors. It's a series of tubes.
This line is getting really old. It's also utter hogwash. The only credence I'll give to it is if you over drive a tube amp its distortion sounds less painful than an over driven solid state amp.
The argument is akin to the nuts who believe records (vinyl) are superior to CDs. Yes, vinyl has a warmth to it but that's essentially the minute hiss of the needle scraping the record surface. In other words the warmth people like about vinyl is a fundamental flaw that's just been adopted as an inherent greatne
not entirely (Score:2, Interesting)
Not really-- if you're AMD, Moore's Law and Murphy's Law are kind of becoming the same thing [infoworld.com].
rewritten history (Score:5, Insightful)
Julius Edgar Lilienfeld [wikipedia.org]. Due to his patents many claims by Bell Labs were thrown out.
The device that was invented by Bell Labs in 1947 was a point contact transistor. An inherently fragile device not fit for mass production. The same device was invented in parallel in France by two german Scientists: Welker and Matere see here [wikipedia.org].
Schockley himself did however invent the bipolar junction transistor a couple of years later. This invention was truly a streak of genius as it is the most complex of all devices.
So, thanks to american corporate giants history was rewritten again.
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If I recall correctly Lilienfeld never actually constructed the transistor. So I think it is safe to say it is the 60th anniversary of the first physically-existent transistor and not the 60th anniversary of the idea of a transistor.
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Mod parent down for being plain stupid.
Lilienfeld did in fact invent the working principle of the transistor. Whether he built one is not known. However he did all the groundlaying work on electrolytic capacitors as they are still used today. Therefore he knew very well how to create extremely thin insulating Al2O3 film that were a necessity for the type of transitor he described in his patents. It does therefore not appear entirely unlikely that he built some of the devices.
The stuff about surface states i
Give me a break (Score:2)
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No quantum mechanic is required to describe field effect transistors in accumulation mode. And that is exactly what Lilienfeld proposed. The only theory that is required is that of space charge limited current, a field Lilienfeld has several publications in.
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Nope, we are talking about thin film transistors. Main problem is getting the semiconductor off current under control (purity), improve mobility (crystallinity, purity, doping) and getting a good gate insulator that is not attacked by the deposition process. With certain materials it is literally possible to build transistors in your kitchen. (eg. CdS)
Look at the early work in thin films transistors. Schockleys attempts at building FETs suffered from poor silicon deposition. It took until the 70ies until pe
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You mean without Teal? But that is for Silicon devices.
ITT Intermetall did manage to mass produce transistors without any license or technology transfer from Bell labs in the late 40ies...
The Transisor's Significance (Score:5, Interesting)
While you read this post, about 20 transistors were manufactured for every person in the world.
Re:The Transisor's Significance (Score:4, Funny)
Feel free to send me my 20 whenever you get the chance. What sort of transistors are these? MOSFETs? BJTs? N-channel, P-channel? I like them all.
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Although I'm sure you're joking, the number of transistors manufactured as discrete components (ie. something big enough to pick up and solder to a circuit board) is insignificantly small compared to the total number manufactured (most of which are "printed" onto an IC).
For instance, a quad-core pentium contains 820 million transistors, which makes me think that th
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It's a little hard to put the importance of the transistor into perspective. One way of looking at it is about 3 billion transistors are made worldwide - a second. Imagine how different the world would be if these transistors were still made manually with vacuum tubes (or not made at all.)
That must be discrete transistors, as a modern day AMD X2 has over 200m per unit. So 3 billion transistors would only be 15 AMD X2 processors.
Imagine a AMD X2 built out of tubes, 200+ million of them. The power bill..
history of semiconductor engineering (Score:3, Informative)
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The Raytheon CK722 [ck722museum.com] and the G E 2N107. [semiconductormuseum.com]
Moore's-Law-is-ending, no-it-isn't article. (Score:3, Funny)
Obligatory quote from 1947 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Obligatory quote from 2007 (Score:2)
iPod Nano (Score:3, Funny)
Way to go Forbes (Score:2)
Is anybody proofreading at Forbes.com?
Re:Good 'ole days (Score:4, Insightful)
The transistor is part of electronics, and electronics was quite well developed by the time the transistor came along. There were already steps towards miniturization using vacuum tubes as small as 3/8" across and only about 3/4" high, which was not that much larger than the first transistors. There were plenty of tubes that carried more than one circuit within the glass enclosure, so in effect they would already be 'integrated circuits' of sorts.
The transistors main contribution was the fact that it was 'solid state', no glow current needed (so much less power consumption, which in turn allowed much further miniaturization) and the fact that they could directly switch current at voltages that could drive devices directly instead of through large bulky transformers. All the rest (thin film, the fet and so on) followed from there but are also just 'chapters' in the book of electronics.
The basics are:
- electromechanics (wiring, switches, relays)
- passive components (resistors, capacitors, coils, diodes, etc)
- active components (transistors, tubes, various variations on the transistor)
- integrated circuits (which is a subbranch of active components)
Relays, interestingly are also 'active' components in a sense.
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I would argue that one of the main contributions of the transistor was that they are not expected to wear out during normal usage. Tubes are not reliable enough to build complicated circuits (e.g. computers) for the mass market out of. Think "one tube failing every two days" like ENIAC, except repeated across millions of desktop PCs.
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And yes, the lack of wear is a significant plus for the transistor, in fact a point could probably be made for the development of redundancy and 'hot swap' (tubes run hot to the touch
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Vacuum tubes contain a tungsten filament that is heated up using a (typically) 6.3 V power source totally independent of the rest of the circuit.
This current causes the filament to heat up to roughly orange in the visual spectrum and it will have a cloud of electrons boiling around it. This is also known as a 'hot' Cathode, in that it produces the desired effect by heating up a piece of metal. The byproduct of this process is a
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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
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Trap the heat ??? that must be one of those things that we are not going to agree on, no matter how you produce a given amount of power in a given amount of space you'll not be 'trapping' any of it, the object (vacuum tube cathode, electric blanket, whatever fl
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> 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, t
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Tubes CAN be made on a microscopic scale... (Score:2)
http://bwrc.eecs.berkeley.edu/People/Grad_Students/botis/documents/papers/243_botis.pdf [berkeley.edu]
When tubes get that small, one no longer needs high voltages and heated cathodes to achieve electron emission. The electrostatic field and a tiny emitter point will work just fine. If solid state never came around, who knows
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I'd hate to think of a 1Gb dram based on any kind of tube technology though
But maybe we'd have core memories assembled by nano machines instead, we'll never know...
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These "vital relays" are made today by Union Switch and Signal [switch.com]
and Alstom [alstomsign...utions.com].
Certain applications, which by law must use safety-rated components, include relays.
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All the conspiracy theorists on the Web are really GOVERNMENT AGENTS! You're all just PRETENDING to be conspiracy theorists, to distract us so we don't notice your GREAT CONSPIRACY!
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You write this in 2007 and mention a UFO incident on 7/7 1947... Coincidence?
2 posts about this subject appear on this page, one enumerating 2 points and the other mentioning 2 dates, and these posts appear 22 minutes apart... Coincidence?
I think not. Clearly this can't be coincidence. Clearly you're an alien pretending to be a conspiracy theorist.