Electronics All In One for Dummies

By the time I was old enough to start studying electronics, that old TV set was replaced by a new color set that wasn’t nearly as interesting to look at inside. The big picture tube was still there, but all the little glowing thumb- sized tubes had been replaced by little silver cans smaller than a thimble.

Transistors had taken over, and I hated them. Tubes were much more interesting than transistors. They got hot and glowed. You could see little wire structures inside them — little towers with meshes and grids and who knows what else. Transistors just looked like little thimbles. It was as if someone had built a television set out of stuff they found in my mom’s sewing drawer.

I was quite certain that the spaceships on my favorite TV shows like Star Trek, Lost in Space, and Land of the Giants were all run on tubes, not transis- tors. It wasn’t until I found out that real spaceships like Gemini and Apollo were filled with transistors and had nary a tube that I decided maybe transistors were okay. If they were good enough for NASA, they were good enough for me.