Subject: Transistors (1 of 2)

From: "Tillman, Edward" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon Mar 17 12:08:39 2003

Articles named as found on MSNBC newspage links to Newsweek.    Still
thought you might enjoy!
 
[Article Begins...]
 
The Irresistible Transistor 
 
Fifty years ago this month, a man embraced his inner hobbyist and gave
thousands of 
engineers their first transistor 
 
By Harry Goldstein 
 
Is it possible to love a transistor? Certainly what Jack Ward feels for the
Raytheon 
CK722, the first transistor sold to the general public, goes beyond casual
affection. 
He's collected thousands of early transistor specimens, including dozens of
CK722s. 
His stately yellow Victorian home on a quiet, tree-lined street in
Brookline, Mass., 
has a basement crammed with enough code oscillators, Geiger counters,
radios, hand-
wrought circuit boards, transistorized hearing aids, subminiature vacuum
tubes, diodes, 
resistors, and capacitors to make any collector of vintage electronic gear
drool. He's 
written one book about the CK722 and has started another about early
transistor history 
at RCA. When he's not working as associate director of quality for the
Bedford, Mass., 
facility of gene-chip maker Affymetrix Inc., he's busy maintaining his
virtual Transistor 
Museum on the Web and is widely acknowledged by fellow collectors as a
techno-
anthropologist par excellence. 
[...Article Ends]

Cheers!
Ed Tillman
Store Automation Tech Support Specialist
 Valero Energy Corporation
San Antonio, Texas, USA
Office: (210)592-3110, Fax (210)592-2048
Email: [email-masked] <mailto:[email-masked]> 

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