Author Topic: It is 1959, you are an EE, confused and undecided whether to….  (Read 3285 times)

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Offline RJSV

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Re: It is 1959, you are an EE, confused and undecided whether to….
« Reply #25 on: May 30, 2024, 10:17:38 pm »
   My guesstimation is, that the Live MUSIC industry was the factor that made Vac Tubes persistent.   Even within the various Guitar / Bass Amp manufacturers we debated, and took stubborn stances.
Perhaps the better linearity etc of IC parts helped, slowly with partial abandonment of vac tubes.
   I'm wondering if any SPACE PROBES had used vac. tubes that had....radioactive elements incorporated in each filament.   I.E.  Cold Filament versions, to avoid the 1 watt of filament heater usually needed?

   Growing up in 1950, youngsters would often get their start, by way of kind neighbors offering older radios / phonographs, etc.
Yay Magnavox !    Awesum WOOD and bent-wood cabinets.
Even the knobs were works of art (carved).
 

Offline Sal Ammoniac

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Re: It is 1959, you are an EE, confused and undecided whether to….
« Reply #26 on: May 30, 2024, 10:36:07 pm »
Here's another perhaps not too well know fact: The first "integrated circuits" were not made with transistors. Tubes with multiple active elements and passive components existed decades before Kilby/Noyce invented the transistor-based IC in the late 50s.
"That's not even wrong" -- Wolfgang Pauli
 

Offline Circlotron

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Re: It is 1959, you are an EE, confused and undecided whether to….
« Reply #27 on: May 30, 2024, 10:58:59 pm »
…use the familiar Vacuum Tube technology or that pesky newcomer the Transistor, for your new product.

No worries, mate! The Electron Tube information Council has printed a dandy new brochure to clarify your doubts. After reading it, you’ll certainly be convinced to use the….the…. What was the name of that Council, again?
Anyways, have yourself a wonderful read: https://www.rcaselectron.com/TNT.html
That publication sounds like all the naysayers on YouTube warning us that electric cars are going nowhere, and that ICE cars are the way, the truth and the life.
 
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Offline tom66

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Re: It is 1959, you are an EE, confused and undecided whether to….
« Reply #28 on: May 30, 2024, 11:05:17 pm »
…use the familiar Vacuum Tube technology or that pesky newcomer the Transistor, for your new product.

No worries, mate! The Electron Tube information Council has printed a dandy new brochure to clarify your doubts. After reading it, you’ll certainly be convinced to use the….the…. What was the name of that Council, again?
Anyways, have yourself a wonderful read: https://www.rcaselectron.com/TNT.html
That publication sounds like all the naysayers on YouTube warning us that electric cars are going nowhere, and that ICE cars are the way, the truth and the life.

Worse, it has such promises like heaterless tubes (did they ever happen?) and micro-integrated tubes the size of transistors... hmm seems unlikely given we can fit billions of them on silicon now.  A bit like the people convinced hydrogen cars or synfuels will be the future, rather than the technology that obviously currently works.
 

Online coppice

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Re: It is 1959, you are an EE, confused and undecided whether to….
« Reply #29 on: May 31, 2024, 01:11:26 am »
…use the familiar Vacuum Tube technology or that pesky newcomer the Transistor, for your new product.

No worries, mate! The Electron Tube information Council has printed a dandy new brochure to clarify your doubts. After reading it, you’ll certainly be convinced to use the….the…. What was the name of that Council, again?
Anyways, have yourself a wonderful read: https://www.rcaselectron.com/TNT.html
That publication sounds like all the naysayers on YouTube warning us that electric cars are going nowhere, and that ICE cars are the way, the truth and the life.
The GE advert about tubes for computers is deranged, but the book is actually reasonably balanced. It was targeted at designers building products for the next couple of years, not the long term. In 1959 a designer could choose between expensive fragile germanium transistors that failed when you got the junction beyond about 60C, and tubes. Even in the mid 60s there were more new products using tubes than transistors. Even some portable things, like car radios, were still being introduced with tubes well into the 1960s. Its easy to look back and see the extent to which the tube business was on borrowed time, but it wasn't that obvious that things would change as fast as they did looking forward.
 
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Online coppice

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Re: It is 1959, you are an EE, confused and undecided whether to….
« Reply #30 on: May 31, 2024, 01:19:14 am »
Worse, it has such promises like heaterless tubes (did they ever happen?) and micro-integrated tubes the size of transistors...
Heaterless tubes did exist, and were very small, but their performance was poor and they didn't catch on. They might have been too expensive, too. Heaterless tubes were revived at the beginning of the 80s, being fabricated using standard semiconductor processes and silicon. There was real excitement about possible high performance using them, but people like Mitel perfected fast isolated CMOS, and that blew them away.
hmm seems unlikely given we can fit billions of them on silicon now.  A bit like the people convinced hydrogen cars or synfuels will be the future, rather than the technology that obviously currently works.
In 1959 the idea that semiconductors with even a few thousand parts on a small die was science fiction. Do you think anyone working at that time could forsee where we are now?
 

Online schmitt triggerTopic starter

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Re: It is 1959, you are an EE, confused and undecided whether to….
« Reply #31 on: May 31, 2024, 01:24:44 am »
Other than CRTs, vacuum tubes usage persisted on high power RF devices, like a radio or TV broadcast transmitter.

I ignore whether this is still true.
 

Offline coppercone2

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Re: It is 1959, you are an EE, confused and undecided whether to….
« Reply #32 on: May 31, 2024, 01:58:04 am »
…use the familiar Vacuum Tube technology or that pesky newcomer the Transistor, for your new product.

No worries, mate! The Electron Tube information Council has printed a dandy new brochure to clarify your doubts. After reading it, you’ll certainly be convinced to use the….the…. What was the name of that Council, again?
Anyways, have yourself a wonderful read: https://www.rcaselectron.com/TNT.html
That publication sounds like all the naysayers on YouTube warning us that electric cars are going nowhere, and that ICE cars are the way, the truth and the life.

Worse, it has such promises like heaterless tubes (did they ever happen?) and micro-integrated tubes the size of transistors... hmm seems unlikely given we can fit billions of them on silicon now.  A bit like the people convinced hydrogen cars or synfuels will be the future, rather than the technology that obviously currently works.


imagine it did not have the FET thin gate problem. if it could handle the power some how, a small size vacuum tube would be accepted in power electronics, and possibly simple circuits made more robust (i.e. PSU basic logic / telemetry (feedback opamp/comparator etc). For the power side of things, even basic TI (thermionic) CPU to do operations involving power factor stuff would be welcome IMO. Ceramic composition resistors are basically a improved 1840's technology and they were seen as welcome for power electronics that needs to be robust. 10% tolerance and 4$ for a resistor but there is reason to buy it because its tough and low on parasitic effects.
« Last Edit: May 31, 2024, 02:04:33 am by coppercone2 »
 

Offline Andy Chee

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Re: It is 1959, you are an EE, confused and undecided whether to….
« Reply #33 on: May 31, 2024, 02:31:43 am »
Other than CRTs, vacuum tubes usage persisted on high power RF devices, like a radio or TV broadcast transmitter.

I ignore whether this is still true.

Tube transmitters are being slowly phased out.  When a tube transmitter reaches end of service life, it is now almost guaranteed to be replaced with a solid state transmitter.

Although they are lower power per "package", SS transmitters can be easily cascaded, thus providing scalability in power output, as well as redundancy.

Also SS transmitters do not have the filament heater electricity costs, many transmitter sites looking to reduce operating costs as much as possible.
 

Offline globoy

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Re: It is 1959, you are an EE, confused and undecided whether to….
« Reply #34 on: May 31, 2024, 02:55:36 am »
In 1959 the idea that semiconductors with even a few thousand parts on a small die was science fiction. Do you think anyone working at that time could forsee where we are now?

Imagine going back in time and handing a 1 TB Micro-SD card to one of the designers of the 1956 IBM RAMAC 5 MB drive.  Imagine what someone 68 years from now might hand us.
 

Offline vk6zgo

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Re: It is 1959, you are an EE, confused and undecided whether to….
« Reply #35 on: May 31, 2024, 03:54:51 am »
In the repair shop, I remember Philips colour TV sets circa mid 1970's were pretty strange - they had both IC's and vacuum tubes in them. Mostly horizontal output, HV damper diode and vertical output as I recall.
Power transistors were late or too expensive I guess.

In Australia, we went to colour in 1975.

All the Colour TVs available were fully solid state in the year or so leading up to "C day", as were the normal colour picture monitors we used at the TV transmitter site where I worked.

We had a Philips k9 as our "domestic" type off air receiver.

There was a huge Blaupunkt valve(tube) colour picture monitor we had hanging around various places for some years, which hardly ever worked.
During one of its brief working periods it was fobbed off on us at the transmitter site.

Strangely the Tektronix RM529 waveform monitors were filled with tubes.

 

Offline RJSV

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Re: It is 1959, you are an EE, confused and undecided whether to….
« Reply #36 on: May 31, 2024, 04:09:52 am »
Circletron:
   'NAYSAYERS',  yeah, thanks for the label (I guess).   I think you meant some of us that just make things up, more based on emotion.
Try my method:  Obtain some of your smarts by listening to folks like the U.S. Secty of Transportation.   By his own words, as he explains the real lack of charging stations built up to now, (vs stated goals).

My jaw dropped, literally, when he stated how many built so far, in his federal program.
   '8' charging stations, as of May 26.
 

Offline vk6zgo

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Re: It is 1959, you are an EE, confused and undecided whether to….
« Reply #37 on: May 31, 2024, 04:18:30 am »
Other than CRTs, vacuum tubes usage persisted on high power RF devices, like a radio or TV broadcast transmitter.

I ignore whether this is still true.

Tube transmitters are being slowly phased out.  When a tube transmitter reaches end of service life, it is now almost guaranteed to be replaced with a solid state transmitter.

Although they are lower power per "package", SS transmitters can be easily cascaded, thus providing scalability in power output, as well as redundancy.

Also SS transmitters do not have the filament heater electricity costs, many transmitter sites looking to reduce operating costs as much as possible.

Analogue TV & Broadcast transmitters had extremely long lives, with the 1959 vintage Marconi TV Tx at ABW2 finally being replaced in the early to mid 1990s. I can't remember the exact date, as I had changed jobs to TVW7 down the road, & just remember the dead Marconis being transported past  on a big truck.

They were replaced with NEC Tx, which used all solid state in the Aural Tx chain & solid state up to & including the PA driver in the Vision Tx, followed with a tube PA.
This worked well as the same solid state PAs could be used in both sections.

We had the same NEC setup at TVW7.

In the years leading up to the change to digital, new all solid state transmitters began to pop up at various sites, preparatory to being used in that service.
They were "liquid cooled" which was to most of us, "a blast from the past", as mainstream water cooling of tube transmitters had disappeared before we had joined the workforce.
 

Offline RJSV

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Re: It is 1959, you are an EE, confused and undecided whether to….
« Reply #38 on: May 31, 2024, 04:18:53 am »
Oh wait, sorry;  I just could not believe my own words, so I googled Pete Budagieg statement, from couple days ago:

   "7" PV charging stations completed, under Biden's 3.5 $ billion plan to establish charging networks.

(Confusing because there are other chargers, when you Google that)
 

Offline EPAIII

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Re: It is 1959, you are an EE, confused and undecided whether to….
« Reply #39 on: May 31, 2024, 07:07:58 am »
A TV set with tubes? WOW! You mean like the RCA that my dad brought home one day. Did yours have a ROUND screen? A real wood cabinet? Did the TV repair guy have to come by every two or three months with his caddy full of tubes? One where all the controls were ON THE SET: no remote. You had to get up to change the channel or volume. You had to adjust the VERTICAL and the HORIZONTAL from time to time or if you changed the channel. Well, when your city finally got a second channel, that is?

Well, I went through all that. Oh, and then there was the Howdy Doody show. In black and white, of course.

Then I got a job in TV and met tube type TV transmitters. Now I was the guy changing the tubes. We pulled each and every one of them on a weekly basis and measured their gain with a tube tester. It was graphed and when the line took a down turn by 5 or 10 percent, out it went. That's how you keep a transmitter with 50 or 75 tubes on the air with only rare outages while in use. And for those rare outages you had a second transmitter with the filaments kept powered up and ready to go at the press of a couple of "Plates" buttons. And it had another 50 to 75 tubes that also had to be tested weekly. The midnight shift guy got that job. Guess who!

At one station the tube salesman came around every six or eight weeks to be sure we were happy with his company's tubes and service. He always bought a nice lunch for me and my assistant at a beach front restaurant/bar in Ft Lauderdale.

And the TV cameras. They were originally a nightmare of tubes. When color came along, it was even worse. You could start a show with three cameras that, after an hour or two of work, were fairly well matched in color. But a half hour later one was green, another purple, and the third blue. And you had to correct them on the fly. TUBES!

I was never so happy as when the 2Ns took over. I suspect the design engineers were the same.



I have seen even a TV set with tubes  (not only the CRT), transistors, ICs and varicaps ... No leds still, it had incandescent lamps.
« Last Edit: May 31, 2024, 07:13:41 am by EPAIII »
Paul A.  -   SE Texas
And if you look REAL close at an analog signal,
You will find that it has discrete steps.
 
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Offline tggzzz

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Re: It is 1959, you are an EE, confused and undecided whether to….
« Reply #40 on: May 31, 2024, 07:40:55 am »
In 1959 the idea that semiconductors with even a few thousand parts on a small die was science fiction. Do you think anyone working at that time could forsee where we are now?

Imagine going back in time and handing a 1 TB Micro-SD card to one of the designers of the 1956 IBM RAMAC 5 MB drive.  Imagine what someone 68 years from now might hand us.

Based on the last 40 years: smaller faster cheaper, but fundamentally the same.

But maybe not: Dennard scaling has hit the long-predicted brick wall, so perhaps there will finally be some interesting innovation.
There are lies, damned lies, statistics - and ADC/DAC specs.
Glider pilot's aphorism: "there is no substitute for span". Retort: "There is a substitute: skill+imagination. But you can buy span".
Having fun doing more, with less
 

Online RoGeorge

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Re: It is 1959, you are an EE, confused and undecided whether to….
« Reply #41 on: May 31, 2024, 08:26:40 am »
Anyways, have yourself a wonderful read: https://www.rcaselectron.com/TNT.html

Quote from https://www.rcaselectron.com/TNT.html
Quote
This man is worried because he sees his entire capital plant becoming scrap within the decade. He makes tubes.

But this is America headed into the sixties. There is nothing that a half a dozen paunchy middle-aged white men can't solve over a lunch, some cigars, and more than a few martinis. A plan was hatched: A smear campaign on that little three-legged bastard. The best minds of Madison Avenure were enlisted and soon The Electron Tube Information Council was formed to tout the virtues and utility of electron tubes.]This man is worried because he sees his entire capital plant becoming scrap within the decade. He makes tubes.

But this is America headed into the sixties. There is nothing that a half a dozen paunchy middle-aged white men can't solve over a lunch, some cigars, and more than a few martinis. A plan was hatched: A smear campaign on that little three-legged bastard. The best minds of Madison Avenure were enlisted and soon The Electron Tube Information Council was formed to tout the virtues and utility of electron tubes.

That's woke propaganda:  yet another attempt to associate white men with something bad, plus, that's an entirely fabricated story, so a lie.

If you think that's not propaganda in disguise, then replace "white men" with "jews", and read that paragraph again.  Now you see what is wrong with that link?
 
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Offline soldar

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Re: It is 1959, you are an EE, confused and undecided whether to….
« Reply #42 on: May 31, 2024, 09:56:14 am »
Don't overreact. I agree that the woke point of view (white men, cigars, etc) is unnecessary but the fact is that a bunch of people, white men because that is who were in those positions those days, decided to create "The Electron Tube Information Council to tout the virtues and utility of electron tubes".

And it is a strategy that has been used by many groups interested in continuing to sell what they make when they see a competing technology coming down the road.

In general it is a losing strategy. Companies that are rigid tend to fail. Companies that are flexible and adapt and change tend to succeed. We all know many examples.

And it is not only products and technologies but entire countries. American automakers deprecated Japanese cars like American electronics manufacturers deprecated Japanese  products.

Today we see the same with Chinese products. It's propaganda, it might work a little bit in the short term but I think in the long term it will fail.
« Last Edit: May 31, 2024, 09:57:46 am by soldar »
All my posts are made with 100% recycled electrons and bare traces of grey matter.
 
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Online schmitt triggerTopic starter

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Re: It is 1959, you are an EE, confused and undecided whether to….
« Reply #43 on: May 31, 2024, 03:03:43 pm »


Although they are lower power per "package", SS transmitters can be easily cascaded, thus providing scalability in power output, as well as redundancy.

Also SS transmitters do not have the filament heater electricity costs, many transmitter sites looking to reduce operating costs as much as possible.

Do they still operate in Class C? Or is it Class D?
 

Offline RJSV

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Re: It is 1959, you are an EE, confused and undecided whether to….
« Reply #44 on: May 31, 2024, 05:57:23 pm »
Ah ha;  The 'WOKE' quotation comes from some other web site!  I read 'Paunchy' as a 'FATTY' put-down, again the foreign quote (not an EEVBLOG forum thread).
   Those 'fatty', or 'paunchy' person put-downs are a trigger for those overweight.  Good thing THIS forum seems clear of any constant reminders, of things sifting down to the
   'Lowest Common Denominator'.

   That's a math term but I think it meant that (now) everyone must function at a low enough level, so as not to offend (the blithen idiots).

How about substitute words, into the current roll call of US University demonstrators;
   Paunchy demonstrators took over the Admin building today.

   And,  Who did the underline and bold print the term 'White Men' ?

   I know of one of those, in power right now (although he dont know it).   Yeah, him.  The one who voted to incarcerate blacks...
Ask Kamala, about men conspiring, to block any further upward promotion.  She's excluded from movement, as plans are laid,  in back rooms.

Great,...now you've baited me to refute crap from OTHER forums.....(sorry)
 

Offline Alex Eisenhut

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Re: It is 1959, you are an EE, confused and undecided whether to….
« Reply #45 on: June 01, 2024, 12:05:01 am »
Worse, it has such promises like heaterless tubes (did they ever happen?)

https://patents.google.com/patent/EP0503638A2/en

Don't think there was an actual product but seems the physics is there.

Then there's the Thermionic Integrated Micro Module.

Or

http://www.hts-homepage.de/Silizium/Silizium.html
« Last Edit: June 01, 2024, 12:31:53 am by Alex Eisenhut »
Hoarder of 8-bit Commodore relics and 1960s Tektronix 500-series stuff. Unconventional interior decorator.
 

Offline vk6zgo

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Re: It is 1959, you are an EE, confused and undecided whether to….
« Reply #46 on: June 01, 2024, 04:09:52 am »
Oh wait, sorry;  I just could not believe my own words, so I googled Pete Budagieg statement, from couple days ago:

   "7" PV charging stations completed, under Biden's 3.5 $ billion plan to establish charging networks.

(Confusing because there are other chargers, when you Google that)

Doesn't PV refer to "standalone" Photo voltaic (Solar cell powered) stations, rather than ones connected to the "grid"?
As the grid in the USA is extensive, most charging stations would be supplied from that.

There are likely more "standalone" solar powered stations in Australia, as we do have gaps in our grid.
 

Offline vk6zgo

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Re: It is 1959, you are an EE, confused and undecided whether to….
« Reply #47 on: June 01, 2024, 04:20:20 am »


Although they are lower power per "package", SS transmitters can be easily cascaded, thus providing scalability in power output, as well as redundancy.

Also SS transmitters do not have the filament heater electricity costs, many transmitter sites looking to reduce operating costs as much as possible.

Do they still operate in Class C? Or is it Class D?

Certainly the last generation of analog TV transmitters operated in Class B, as linear amplifiers.
The old tube Tx used class C, high level modulated with high power video signals.

Low level modulated transmitters using superheterodyne principles allowed much of the transmitter circuitry to be interchangeable between Tx on different channels.
 
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Offline RJSV

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Re: It is 1959, you are an EE, confused and undecided whether to….
« Reply #48 on: June 01, 2024, 04:48:29 am »
Sorry, my mistake!
   Was thinking 'EV' or 'Electric Vehicle',  but I used 'PV' by mistake.

So, it should have said:
   'number of EV charging stations, built so far, under 3.5 $billion dollar program'
 

Offline Andy Chee

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Re: It is 1959, you are an EE, confused and undecided whether to….
« Reply #49 on: June 01, 2024, 10:10:52 pm »


Although they are lower power per "package", SS transmitters can be easily cascaded, thus providing scalability in power output, as well as redundancy.

Also SS transmitters do not have the filament heater electricity costs, many transmitter sites looking to reduce operating costs as much as possible.

Do they still operate in Class C? Or is it Class D?

This video may be educational:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=LOAoG5GwAEQ

Don’t let the title AM fool you. The later discussed techniques can be used for any arbitrary signal, DRM, DAB, or old skool AM. This is what makes modern solid state architecture flexible.
« Last Edit: June 01, 2024, 10:15:17 pm by Andy Chee »
 
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