Tube🌿Timefeast your ocular orbs on this cross section of a miniature Nuvistor vacuum tube.
and here is the Nuvistor, flanked by a "miniature" vacuum tube on the left and a transistor from the same era on the right. RCA's Nuvistor was just a micro-miniaturized vacuum tube they felt could beat the transistor. (it did not.)
Karl Matthias 🇺🇦@tubetime never heard of this before. So cool.
Pheedback Phil@tubetime my parents threw out my nuvistor and valve collection while I was at university in th 1980s ☹️. Nuvistor kit would have survived EMP effects from atom bomb much better than transistor kit as I understand it, which was something on our minds back then!
Mike Prior-Jones@tubetime I dimly recall someone selling very expensive nuvistor-based hifi amplifiers in the 90s, back when there was still cachet in valve amplifiers
@tubetime found it: https://ebay.us/m/fGBNTd
Still very expensive!
bitsavers.orgCheck hamfests if people want to find some. They were used in early 60's Motorola PT-100 Handie-Talkies
Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen
Hal Aetus@tubetime I'd never heard of these until a recent YT video by 8-bit Guy. I don't even remember seeing them in the electronics I poked around in when I was a kid. I guess they were pretty spendy to make as they hadn't had a chance to scale production much, so they didn't make it into a lot of stuff. But, wow, what a cool lil dude. If semiconductors weren't a thing, we could've eventually had Pip Boys instead of smart phones (probably wouldn't have been very "smart" though).