Early days of electronics are just yesterday
Early days of electronics are just yesterday
By: Bill Mead
Topics:
Posted by editor Tue Nov 30, 1999 00:00:00 PST
Viewed 744 times
0 responses 0 comments Our granddaughter Nikki and her husband Buddy came by the house over the weekend and something in our conversation took me back to the days when radios and TVs were full of vacuum tubes.
When I started to reminisce, it quickly became clear they didn't have a clue what I was talking about. I don't believe they have ever seen a vacuum tube because their expressions remained blank when I described it as a sort of light bulb with lots of thingies in the middle. I wasn't talking down to them. That's about all I know on the subject.
I do know that when a tube went out in one of our early television sets we were all through watching Ed Sullivan. Since the blown tube couldn't be picked out from the unblown ones in most cases, this called for pulling out all of them and heading to Thrifty Drug Store where they had a tube tester.
The first time I went through this drill, I had no problem picking out the bad tube and buying a replacement, also at Thrifty. But when I got home I quickly discovered that I should have made some notes as to where the tubes should be plugged back in. I never made that mistake again.
This episode reminded me again that technology is moving so fast that we oldsters forget that people even a little younger can't share many of our experiences with material things.
The median Californian was born after 1970. That's why these folks can't believe we used to travel in the summertime without auto air conditioning, for example. By 1970, almost all new vehicles came with it. You have to be over 50 to recall when traveling through the Mojave Desert in July was about as comfy as crossing Death Valley in a covered wagon.
To fully appreciate this generational gap we have to get back to those old vacuum tubes and their successors, the transistors and integrated circuits we accept and then ignore.
Many historians consider the development of solid state electronics as significant as the invention of the printing press and the automobile in shaping society. Microchips seem to be buried in most things we buy today. Personal computers wouldn't exist if we still depended on those cumbersome vacuum tubes.
Ditto for such diverse things as heart pacemakers, kitchen gadgets and multi-function wrist watches. More importantly, integrated circuits are the main reason why cars use less gas, burn it cleaner and why air travel is so incredibly safe compared to decades ago. We would find it catastrophic if solid state electronics should suddenly disappear and we had to go back to how things were right after the end of World War II.
Vacuum tubes haven't disappeared, however. I found hundreds of internet websites offering all kinds of them for sale. I guess they are sought after by restorers of old radios and such and for use in new guitar amplifiers and certain upscale audio systems among other uses.
Does anybody know what Thrifty did with its old tube testers? I have a place of honor for one of them in our living room.
| Send to a Friend | Report a Violation |
