Slashdot Mirror
Transistor Radio Turns 50
theodp writes "Before the iPod, there was the Regency TR-1. Fifty years ago Monday, tiny Indianapolis-based I.D.E.A. partnered with TI and shook the world with the first pocket-sized AM radio, so impressing IBM chief Tom Watson that he provided a $49.95 (roughly $345 in current dollars!), four transistor TR-1 to each of his senior managers to kick-start the company's transition from valves."
For a neat one page history of the shirt-pocket sized transistor radio along with a picture of the TR-1, go here: transistor radio
http://www.busyweather.com/
UltraSparc IV: 66 million transistors
:-)
Pentium IV Prescott: 125 million transistors
Power4: 170 million transistors
So how many transistors are in the TR-1?
4
For everything else, there's vacuum tubes. (Or diodes, depending on your radio set.)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Must be using one for his web server.
12:50 - press return.
Heh. Funny to think that at one time, a transistor radio would be as ostentatious as the little white iPod headphones.
Of course there were no portable headphones.
Just saying.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
On my way back from a football game where my Dad was using a transistor radio, to listen to the play-by-play, I listened to my 5cmX1cmX3cm transistor Radio Shack radio.
They are ubiquitous in our lives now, and it's hard to imagine a world without miniturized electronics.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Valves = tubes in Brit-speak ...
The germanium transistor was first demonstrated privately at Bell Labs Dec. 23, 1947, by William Shockley and his team. However, production problems delayed its practical use. Until it was perfected, the invention was kept secret for 7 months and no patents were filed until 1948; the first public announcement was June 30, 1948.
Nowadays, it's more like the patent was filed 5 years ago out of thin air, first public announcement was 24 months ago. Product is sold with some bugs and patches/fixes/recalls were made in the following 24 months.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
How many people on slashdot have been alive this long?
Wow. What struck me most about that article is how much inflation there's been in 50 years. Thats 700%! I don't know about you, but to me that's just insane.
Victory or awesome!
And I think the IC's I was working on 35 years ago were produced from one inch wafers and were one transister or diode per chip which were mounted in an IC to replace a vacuum tube or valve based circuit.
But that's progress. Now you can have a 3 Ghz pentium that will put out as much heat as that old vacuum tube based technology ever could.
If you look at the expanded pic of the "shirt-pocket radio", you also see a Zenith hearing aid, which has a shape (especially considering the location of the earphone) surprisingly similar to an iPod...
"How many people on slashdot have been alive this long?"
And are still virgins?
Didnt the TR-1 only have 3 transistors? sure the TI reference design had 4, but i could swear that their engineers managed to cut one of em out to make it cheaper.
You say $345 with an exclamation mark as if that's a lot of money for a portable entertainment device. How much do you think an iPod costs? Or a Rio?
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I was on a bus today, and I saw a kid with one of those old Shockwave tape players. You know those yellow ones that had two black hatches that would close it.
It had antiskip on the cd player version of the shockwave, and it was so cool. This was when I was back in elementary school, and I wanted one so badly.
I thought to myself, wow that thing was huge, how did we ever use tapes! and I looked around and saw all the people with ipods or other mp3 players on the bus. Even mini-disc players are way to outdated nowadays.
How quickly technology changes..
And I, for one, want to welcome the arrival of our new iPod Overlords!
-Ocelot Wreak.
"I figure you're here 'cause you need some whacko who's willing to stick his finger in the fan. So who are we helping?
I can remember fishing with my dad as we listened to the Cardinals play by play on his. He won it in a national sales contest and I might add was quite the object of jealosy for having it.
If I remember right his had 9 transistors. At that time when you bought one it would tell you how many transistors it had. The more transistors the better the "quality" and the higher the price. 9 was pretty much top of the line for portables.
The Sony's where considered cheap and low quality. (and they fell apart so very easy.) If you wanted a good one there was only one way to go. RCA. Though the people from Phillips and GE had their contenders.
The RCA's had honestly better quality speakers etc so there was a difference in quality (over the cheap Japanese imports). His also took a single 9 volt battery and a small V/U meter to tell you signal strength. Even heard my first Beatles tune on it.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
Tom Watson that he provided a $49.95 (roughly $345 in current dollars!), four transistor TR-1 to each of his senior managers to kick-start the company's transition from valves."
I wish I had specific references of this, but it was a practice by some portable radio manufacturers to add extra transistors just so they could market as being a *12 transistor* radio. I've seen a couple of these where they only used two poles directly from the battery i.e. as diodes. I've seen one case where they just added extra ones before the speaker which did reduce over all sound quality. Sorta like they added an extra unnessicary smoke stack to the Titanic, cause more is better.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Just for nastalga sake, I still have my grandfathers "Walkman" It's from the 50's when plastics were the big thing. It's bright red, pre-transistor AM radio about the size of a gradeschool lunchbox. It uses 3 sets of batteries. It used a 1.5 volt filimant battery, a 22.5 volt battery (about the size of a nine-volt) and the big high voltage B battery of 67 volts. It does not use an AC cord.
Going transistor improved battery life and permitted smaller size. Due to the smaller size and early speaker technology, the early transistor radios were known for their tin sound. They mostly sounded like a set of headphones on a desk. Earphones (mono in the ear) were common as was simply holding the radio up to the ear like a cell phone.
Being an early geek in those days meant taking apart some of the early transistor radios. (grade shool age) Deceptive marketing was common. Just like the standards for car audio watts (RMS, Peak, per channel, all channels together, un distorted, 10% distortion, max power at any distortion etc..).
Transistor count was the big seller.. The more the better. I remember taking apart a 9 transistor radio only to discover that only 3 of the transistors were used. 3 of them had all three leads stuck in the same hole. 3 of them were used as diodes with two leads in one hole and the other lead in another hole. It was a simple regenerative reciever, not a superhetrodyne with some semblance of fideliety.
In marketing, not much has changed in the years.
My old printer claims X number of pages ink yeild for it's color cartrige at 15% page coverage. The new printer claims it does more pages with it's high yeild cartrige. In the fine print it does 1.5X more pages but at 5% coverage. In my book, that's less yeild. The new cartrige is over twice the price. Carts refrenced are the HP 23 and the HP 78. I can get two of the former for about $45 or one of the latter for $52. Needless to say, my old printer is the primary color printer, not the new one. Thanks to the truth in advertising, they do specify how the page yeild was calculated, but they have gone a long way to imply comparing page count of these two cartridges is accurate, when it is deceptive. Do you want the 600 page count cartrige or the 900 page count one? Come on guys. point out the 600 count is with 15% coverage and the 900 count is with 5% coverage. (page counts rounded off for example. See HP's website for stated page yeild claims.
The truth shall set you free!
That reminds me of an AM radio I built from one of those copper coil kits for kids. It was more of an ear-plug than a headphone, though. And when I say ear-plug, I mean that it was a massive thing that went right down your ear canal.
Which reminds me of the first headphone I ever used. It was a single ear-plug that plugged into one of those K-Mart black and white TVs. It was plastic, but the cord was a simple twisted deal. Not much in the way of wire protection.
God, this stuff takes me back.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
My first impression seeing that picture was that the thing in the front was some recent MP3 player, put there to contrast it with the old radios.. Only reading the text below revealed it was a 1952 design. Case is quite rounded and silver and very small.
I remember the prestige accorded to the transistor count in those early radios; it was bragging rights for us kids on the playground to have the radio with the higher count. Trouble was, the manufacturers caught on to this early and soldered in fake parts to raise their total. I remember a picture in an electronics mag showing the bottom of the printed circuit board in one radio, showing all three leads of each of a couple of the transistors soldered together in as one big connected blob.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item =2269893061
Who knows how long the photos will stay up, but if you do a completed-items search on "Regency TR-1" you'll find several other examples.
I wonder how much a MINT!! RARE!!11! NWE IN BOX L@@K!! iPod will fetch in 2054?
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Writen by humorist James Thurber for the New Yorker back in the late 50's or early 60s. The essay is in this book.
He writes of his drawer-full of cheap Japanese knockoffs that worked for a few days, then began to each emit a strange and unique sound - his fond reminiscing about 'Old Squeem' still makes me laugh.
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
'which has a shape...surprisingly similar to an iPod...
...you mean a rectangle?
When I was 5 my dad helped me build a crystal radio from scratch.
we wrapped copper wire around a TP roll, got a germanium diode, a copper strip, a 2,000ohm earphone and a board.
We wrapped the wire around the TP roll and shellaced it. We screwed the copper strip to the board with the other parts, wired it all up and I was listening to radio without batteries. I thought that was neater than hell (in 1966) and it really inspired me to experimenting.
When I was six, a kid gave me a transistor radio he dropped, it ripped the speaker, earphone jack and battery wires loose from the board and he considered it trash. I took it home, locked myself in my dads workshop and spent a while studying the schematic that was glued to the back cover. I got my dads soldering iron and fixed it. It worked. But I hid it in a cigar box because I was afraid my dad would kick my ass for using his tools without asking. My dad found the radio and I had to tell him what I did. He didn't beat me, he gave me all of his old TV and Radio repair tools to play with. That pretty much set it in stone for me from that point..
Because in much of the USA in those days, drugstores were among the few stores permitted to do business on Sunday.
Seven-Elevens had tube testers as late as the mid-Seventies.
rj
From a person which did not live in a tube world back in the old days. I must admit, I have gone back to tubes (values) for my audio needs. After rebuilding a Dynaco ST 70 and my own Tube pre-amp. I will never go back to solid state technology. I use to laugh at people that said that tube audio amps sounded better than todays gear. Well, after I have heard a tube amp. It has changed my mind.
An added benefit, it's very easy to build a simple tube amp or pre-amp.
Tubes were replaced with Transisters, but there is still a place in todays world for tubes.
I'm just building my first 300b monoblocks. I look forward to smashing my current future shop transister gear out of the way.
PBS has an excellent timeline that describes the history of the transistor,
'Transistorized! The History of the Invention of the Transisor'.
That reminds me of an AM radio I built from one of those copper coil kits for kids. It was more of an ear-plug than a headphone, though. And when I say ear-plug, I mean that it was a massive thing that went right down your ear canal.
A crystal radio.
Sadly, every crystal radio I ever built only picked up WBAL, which turned me into a talk radio junkie at 7.
Valves? I didn't know IBM had been in the plumbing business?
You've never seen an IBM 3081. Dual CPUs and water cooled and the one I used in '93 had an uptime of 13 years.
A Transistor radio mini-history has a picture of an early transistor circa 1947. From the website:
...USA research scientists of Bell Laboratories, Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain managed, in December 1947, to invent a solid state device that they called THE TRANSISTOR. They succeeded in creating a completely new amplifying device just by adding a second contact point to the already popular CRYSTAL DIODE based on a piece of germanium crystal with a pointed "cat's whisker" touching its surface. In 1956 in recognition for their extraordinary work they were awarded the Nobel Prize. (Can't tell from the website if this one pictured was the very first one invented by Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain of Bell Laboratories.)
Transistor inventors Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain were awarded a Nobel prize for their work in 1956. It's amazing how something so primitive went on to revolutionize the electronics industry.
Sig cancelled due to lack of interest
[musing mode on]
Well, it would probably be similar to taking an original Han Solo action figure and modding it into a new, modern Jar Jar toy. An exercise in bad judgement.
You'd be better off to sell it on ebay for $1000, and invest that money in finding either a similar but empty case to fill, or just paint a new iPod silver and do some calligraphy on it. Then pocket the change.
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
It's hard to say, the glory days are over now. Dubya has sent all the good jobs overseas.
w stuffworks.com/
/ radio.htm l#crystal
Still, it's a GOOD thing to know about electronics. And it's fun too.
Here's a great site to get kids started,
http://scitoys.com/
and
http://www.ho
And of course here's how a kid can build his own radio from stuff laying around the house..
http://scitoys.com/scitoys/scitoys/radio
If you look at the expanded pic of the "shirt-pocket radio", you also see a Zenith hearing aid, which has a shape (especially considering the location of the earphone) surprisingly similar to an iPod...
"Why a hearing aid?" you may ask. Interesting history there - Bell Labs, probably in view of the work done by Alexander Graham Bell with the deaf and hard of hearing, allowed transistors to be used in hearing aids without royalty payments. If you have ever seen the large B batteries once used with vacuum tubes, you will understand why the transistor was such a breakthrough in creating a wearable hearing aid.
Have you recently visited a store (e.g. Target or Wal-Mart) and tried to buy a new transistor radio (defined as a battery powered radio the size of a pack of cigarettes)? I wanted one to listen to the presidential debates. I couldn't find a transistor radio, or a headphone radio, the smallesst thing they had was a $9 portable radio cassette player that was large enough to have a carrying handle.