But before even those transistor-based computers is a retrocomputing era rarely touched on: the era of programmable vacuum tube machines. [Mike] has gone back to the 1950s with this computer which ...

The transistor was a solid (thus the term "solid-state technology") but had the electrical properties of a vacuum tube. Yet it had none of the drawbacks: it was cheap, sturdy, used little power ...

Vacuum tubes were widely used as diodes and triodes in the electronics ... there's a layer of p-type semiconductor material sandwiched between two layers of n-type material. In a PNP transistor, the ...

If transistors could replace vacuum tubes in the phone system, then they certainly could replace them in computers too. The army, with its need for ever-faster and more efficient calculations ...

circuits [David] has already built vacuum tube versions of. The only part left was the discharge transistor; a pentode was enlisted to stand in for that vital function, making the circuit complete.