A message from The Electron Tube Information Council

"Those three legged bastards". That report wasn't biased at all. :rolleyes:
Fun read though. Thanks for posting.
 
I wish my electron tubes (is 'electron' rather than 'vacuum' adman speak here?) cost a little over half the price of equivalent solid state devices.

The irony is that our Cold War enemies (at the time), took the route advocated by this advert, thereby preserving our access to tubes.

I'm busy restoring part of a Rigonda Boshoi console at the moment. Talk about bombproof construction.
 
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Just imagine they would have won the electronic war. You would need a trailer behind your car for your iPod :) don't even think about mobile phones in general....or all the other little gizmos you use every day. Good read!
 
I lived in Cape Town. I was buying Quad II 'valve' amps, ten of them. The best tube-tester in town wasn't for audio, it was a shipping company. CT is the only major port for thousands of miles, every ship including Russian checked in for maintenance — tanker, freighters, fishing fleets etc. Russians used tubes in all the electronics and those electronics are on all the time, in rough seas, being knocked around like Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull. Even tubes that were 60-70 years old, tested perfect.
 
Car phones existed in the tube days, but they were a LOT different from even the Motorola 'brick phones' of the '70s and '80s. For one thing, you couldn't directly dial a number; using the phone involved putting in a radio call to an operator, who would then patch you through on an old-fashioned switchboard to the party you wished to dial. And yes, the contraptions were rather large; a dash-mounted 'control head' connected to one or more tube-filled boxes in the trunk, which drew lots of current when you 'keyed up', sometimes causing the headlights to dim. Here are some pictures:
CAB1.jpg
30Dtrunk.jpg
Type38A01.jpg WE23901A.jpg
 
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Look how slender and sleek the "electron" tube is depicted standing tall next to the three legged dead insects. What a hoot!
 
They're experimenting with certain micro-organisms for use in computers. Some have compex neural networks, orders of magnitude smaller than any chip we can produce. The smallest metal tracks we can make must still be a molecule thick.
 
They're experimenting with certain micro-organisms for use in computers. Some have compex neural networks, orders of magnitude smaller than any chip we can produce. The smallest metal tracks we can make must still be a molecule thick.

Anything needs to be a molecule/atom thick in order to exist :)
 
They're experimenting with certain micro-organisms for use in computers. Some have compex neural networks, orders of magnitude smaller than any chip we can produce. The smallest metal tracks we can make must still be a molecule thick.
They kind of hit the micron limit. Now you have multi core processors.
 
Anything needs to be a molecule/atom thick in order to exist :)
You raise a great point, but I have to get cosmo-theological on you.

Before the Big Bang, molecules did not exist, so nothing could be a molecule/atom thick — thus could not exist.

Did something exist?
 
Quantum entanglements have no physical support to exist, but do exist and are in use as we speak.
 
Quantum entanglements have no physical support to exist, but do exist and are in use as we speak.
It's uncanny and profound. Einstein called it "spooky magic" and tried to disprove it.

But my question was: Did something exist before the BB?

This is definitely off topic... but we often do.
 
Ok, if we go there so be it.
Matter is energy and energy is matter. Before the BB everything was just energy since in quantum stage.
You were speaking of a layer thickness in conjunction with minimum trace width in semiconductor and that needs a finite thickness and can not just exist as energy in free space to fulfill its purpose of a circuitry :)
Also the organism needs to be in the stage of matter rather than energy to work as such.
 
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