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First IC you came in contact with?
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SeanB:
I have a NOS Sinclair amplifier, I am scared to actually power it up, it might actually work, though there is more probability it will just catch fire. Newmarket transistors third grade QC rejects were the device of choice. They were scooped from the dumpster and checked again, if they were not too leaky ( ie they weren't a dead short with 12V applied) and had a large signal gain of more than 2 they were used.
Dave Turner:
I wax philosophical!

When you think about it doesn't really matter what the 'first' of anything one used was, other than to fix a point in time which really only shows your age. Although I like to think that I grew up with the true start of the microelectronic revolution; arguably the space race in the 60's.

What's more to the point is where do we, and later generations, go from here? It's way past the point where one could 'know' everything relevant about a subject (in electronics or anything else). 90's script kiddies, current hackers. are generally exploitations of weaknesses not true innovations.

Most of what is seen in electronics today by the majority are 'advances?' in social media, not necessarily bad as evinced by this forum; or, more importantly, more efficient ways to do things. But it's not fundamentally new science. We can enjoy electronics as our hobby, work etc.devise new products and will never come to fully understand all aspects of the subject.

I'm more interested in what our great grandchildren may have to say looking back at our time.
Richard Crowley:

--- Quote from: Blofeld on May 15, 2015, 01:57:41 pm ---... I had no clue that years earlier one humble transistor had whole books devoted to him like "Transistor Applications" from Raytheon - "More than 50 practical circuits using Raytheon CK722 transistors". That's quite amazing.

--- End quote ---
But remember that it was the VERY FIRST transistor available to the general public. So using a solid-state transistor was a completely new area of circuit design, and we had to start from somewhere.  And some (many?) of use learn best by studying practical examples to see HOW it was done, and then it is easier to go back and look at the theory to see how it was utilized in a practical circuit, etc.

There almost certainly isn't anyone in these forums old enough to remember the similar point in history when the very first valve/vacuum tube became available to experiment with.  There were almost certainly similar books/information available on valve circuits
CatalinaWOW:
Just happened to be reading a history of those first valves.  There were books on how to use them, but the theory on how they worked as well as the theory of what you could do with them was much more poorly understood.  By todays standards the folks who invented them, those building them, those using them and those writing the books had no real clue what was going on.  One of the principal inventors thought that the actions was due to gases in the tubes.  For the first several years they simply used trial and error to build functioning tubes/valves.  Yields were in the percentage points.  Good tubes were passed from hand to hand by experimentors.  The books were more of - If you hook this up this way and fiddle a while interesting things will happen. 

Transistors were a new way of doing something that was very well understood.  An emitter follower and a cascode follower are the same thing.  The guys in the early tube era were real explorers of unknown territory.
Tandy:
Somewhat related, information about the first IC produced. http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_689592?hootPostID=fd8eeb88a279893823ef32a7e2f2b209
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