RCA 'tubes vs. Transistors' booklet

[ferdieCX]

Competing with IBM was also one of the mistakes that killed DEC.

Talking about RCA, I still use the stereo amplifier that I built in the early 70s, a RCA design with RCA transistors. It has never failed.
Here are my two manuals, bought in 1976 when I was a student. They have survived several moves, mostly overseas.

[schmitt trigger]

Your blue book is exactly the same as mine. Printed in Argentina by Editorial Arbo.

Mine, however, is in worse shape than yours.

[amyk]

Here they are.

The Tube's book is actually in Spanish.

We had the RCA red book - what a nice throwback! I have a few other vaccuum tube books as well, but mostly in portuguese. These are very hard to get digitized without destroying the book.

http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/components/rca/_dataBooks/1975_SC-16_RCA_Solid-State_Devices_Manual.pdf

http://www.nj7p.org/Manuals/PDFs/Tubes/RCA-RC-29-1973.pdf

[rsjsouza]

Since we are talking RCA... Here's an ad:


Which is part of this 1954 Tube manual:


And its arch rival at the time:

[rsjsouza]

Here they are.

The Tube's book is actually in Spanish.

We had the RCA red book - what a nice throwback! I have a few other vaccuum tube books as well, but mostly in portuguese. These are very hard to get digitized without destroying the book.

http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/components/rca/_dataBooks/1975_SC-16_RCA_Solid-State_Devices_Manual.pdf

http://www.nj7p.org/Manuals/PDFs/Tubes/RCA-RC-29-1973.pdf

Thanks a bunch, Amy!

[duak]

I was thinking that by the 80's there was nothing I could buy that RCA made themselves other than some chips, power MOSFETs and vinyl records.  I believe their TVs and VCRs were made by Hitachi and rebadged.  I can't think of anything else that had their logo on it - can anyone else?

[schmitt trigger]

You are correct. In the  early 80s I had a VHS camcorder, labeled RCA, but the internals had actually a Japanese company logo all over....it could have been Hitachi, but can't recall now.

[bsfeechannel]

It was Hitachi.

[jmelson]

Competing with IBM was also one of the mistakes that killed DEC.

Well, actually, it wasn't just IBM, but the computer market changed dramatically in about 1985 or so.  And, I observed with some interest that DEC continued to send out a salesman and a tech guy on every prospective sale.  Made good sense when a prospect was talking about buying a $200K VAX 11/780 with a bunch of drives, to make sure they ordered what they wanted.  Made NO SENSE when the customer was buying a desktop pizza-box computer for $14K or so.

DEC certainly did not reorganize a number of sectors of their organization to accommodate these changes, which were PLAINLY VISIBLE to anyone who looked.

Jon

[ferdieCX]

Competing with IBM was also one of the mistakes that killed DEC.

Well, actually, it wasn't just IBM, but the computer market changed dramatically in about 1985 or so.  And, I observed with some interest that DEC continued to send out a salesman and a tech guy on every prospective sale.  Made good sense when a prospect was talking about buying a $200K VAX 11/780 with a bunch of drives, to make sure they ordered what they wanted.  Made NO SENSE when the customer was buying a desktop pizza-box computer for $14K or so.

DEC certainly did not reorganize a number of sectors of their organization to accommodate these changes, which were PLAINLY VISIBLE to anyone who looked.

Jon

They made several things wrong, including failing to provide an usable personal computer.
They had quality problems with the DEC Professional 350,  supposed to be a personal PDP-11.
The Rainbow PC couldn't even read normal PC diskettes.
The VAXstation 2000 was not cheap and too underpowered for X-Window

[duak]

This paper on DEC's decline & fall echoes what's been said: https://www.sigcis.org/files/Goodwin_paper.pdf  It's a bummer because I worked with DEC equipment & people for a few projects and compared to some other products, the stuff was well designed and worked flawlessly.  I remember that DEC was going after IBM, but IBM was also circling the toilet bowl - IBM survived though.

I hear that GE is not doing so well.  A significant portion of their earnings is from finance rather than manufacturing.  BTW, RCA was a spinoff from GE and if memory serves, GE brought them back in to the fold in 1986.

An illuminating book on Howard Armstrong, the inventor of the superhet receiver and wideband FM (among others) is "The Man of High Fidelity" by Lessing.  It covers his legal battles with RCA over his patents that weren't resolved until after his untimely death.  It seems that RCA was well lawyered and also had their reality distorting field on and were not against trying to change perceptions in their favor.

[MagicSmoker]

...
TV tubes had their dying gasp with plasma but that got buried fast as well.
...

A shame, because I still think plasma delivers a superior picture to any LCD I've come across, especially in rendering dark colors/black and, especially, motion.

I bought the last plasma TV made by Samsung about 5 or 6 years ago and have already gone to the trouble to repair a broken board on it once; I may very well cry when it finally dies...

More on topic, another gem from the past chock full of info you can't hardly find anywhere else these days is the GE SCR Manual; I have a very tattered 6th edition from 1979 on my "most used" bookshelf.

[ferdieCX]

Your blue book is exactly the same as mine. Printed in Argentina by Editorial Arbo.

Editorial Arbó published lots of books about electronics in Spanish, including the ones from Everitt and Terman.
They also published a magazine, the "Revista Telegráfica, which started in 1912 and lasted IIRC up to about 2000

[exe]

It's interesting how freely they talk about military applications: missiles, nuclear bombs (may be not directly, but they talk about radiation), etc. I guess nowadays sales people won't dare to highlight such applications. I guess, if one wants to highlight robustness of equipment, "modern" application area with demand for reliability would be automotive (I don't see many aerospace components on sale, so not mentioning this).