Thread by @TubeTimeUS

time to start reading another set of magazines! this time it is Electronic Design. this issue is from February 1969. based on the cover, this one looks very promising.

you can follow along by finding the PDF scans here: bitsavers.org/magazines/Elec…

and right off the bat, nixie tubes!

a nice-looking gold-plated hybrid circuit. i wonder how they did the "overpasses." they look like some sort of ceramic.

glow lamps, useful for lots of things back in the day. these aren't your average neon lamp--they have precisely controlled characteristics. 1% voltage regulation? not too bad!

and this ad from Allen Bradley has some very nice cross section photos of carbon composition resistors. @bitsavers shared this one a while ago.

here's a very early LED display from HP.

this would make a nice poster. it's very artistic! i like all the swoops and curves of the non-CAD layouts.

monsanto nixie tube counter. huh, i didn't know that they made test equipment.

in the early days, the semiconductor industry was propped up by the military-industrial complex. semiconductors were really expensive back then.

🌻happenings in electronics🌼

chonky mouse

beginnings of NOAA

"The goal of these SRI designers
is to develop system techniques that
would permit people to use the
computer as an "intellectual partner" in their daily work."

these pictures which look so ordinary to us must have looked totally bizarre and alien in 1969.

this photo, from february 1969, might just be the first picture ever taken of someone using a mouse with a coffee cup in the foreground.

"speed is critical to improving [the user's] performance, thus allowing more difficult problems to be attacked in an interactive fashion."

/me looks pointedly at certain very slow websites

ok this is wild. the SRI system used 5" CRTs with cameras pointed at them going out to TV monitors! this allowed them to change the 5" CRT refresh rate to 15Hz without flicker. computers were slower back then, so you just had to work around it.

🤯

as a design engineer, they just described my work day, except this was written in 1969!

this unitrode ad for a bridge rectifier shows what it looks like inside, and then it shows what the inside looks like inside 😂

i mean, it's no Goya, but i wonder how many of the readers got the reference.

😂

(1969) Doug Englebart explains an idea to a colleague while on a Zoom call.

a die photo in an ad! sweet. i wonder what the circuit does, too bad the picture is so grainy.

there's a good article in here on fostering creativity.

this design idea uses a bipolar transistor, an SCR, and a unijunction transistor. what is this, semiconductor bingo? probably not because he forgot to use a MOSFET and a JFET.

😍

Fairchild 9316 4-bit TTL counter. you could easily trace out the circuit from this die photo (or at least part of it).

~~ Pick the BEST IC for the job ~~

now THIS looks interesting. plastic solder?

turns out it is STILL in production, 50 years later! it's a tad expensive though 😂 ellsworth.com/products/adhes…

a crowbar tube! (aka a krytron: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krytron)

hot-swap your DIP chips. sounds risky!

before personal computers, these custom slide rules, charts, and nomograms were common

argh why did i start in 1969? there are issues archived back to 1966. now i have to backtrack.

ok let's rewind back to January 1966.

this wave analyzer has a chain drive going between the chart recorder and the analyzer. it's so...direct.

a pneumatic tube system? that sounds vaguely familiar

art robots from 1966

more electronics art from 1966

more neat die photos in this ad from GI

you can use a flame to amplify sound 🤔

ahh the good old days, when Coors made IC packages. 🍻

this resistor ad has a really nice cutaway view.

1966: someone predicts Zoom

ooh look at that die photo. very 1960s!

you can pretty much work out the schematic by looking at this die photo of the Motorola MC308.

here's another great Allen-Bradley resistor ad.

in 1966, the DIP package was still quite new.

die photos of some early FETs from 1966.

more cool die photos. shift register memories were common in the '60s and '70s.

32-pin flat-pack chip full of flip flops

can an engineer flunk FORTRAN and still find happiness?

happiness is - finding a digital computer with a simple keyboard, whose language is algebra.

inside of a Fairchild hybrid IC, 1966.

the bright future of MOSFETs, looking forward in 1966. that Victor Comptometer looks pretty sweet, i really like the look of that cathode ray tube.

pour one out for polycarbonate film capacitors. despite having some of the best characteristics, they stopped being made when the sole supplier of polycarbonate film discontinued that product line 20 years ago.

before the magnetic stripe, credit cards used to have holes like a punch card. here's what one type of reader looked like.

rate your company on each of the following factors! my %dayjob% got 81, how about yours?

(rating scale for the previous tweet)

in 1966, this was a desktop computer.

it's actually an analog calculator!

GE 4-layer diodes. interesting, i thought only Shockley Semiconductor made them.

twistor wire memory. looks like a variation of core memory.

vacuum thermocouples! 😍

there's an article co-written by the famous Bob Widlar! the uA702 is the first commercially-available analog IC. tl;dr - you can design analog circuits with chips instead of discrete transistors! this was a big deal in 1966.

here's a little history on the uA702.

these Allen Bradley Type J potentiometers are very good. i bought a literal bucketful of them from HSC Electronics before they went under.

here's an article about how to advance your career. some of these points are pretty good advice. some of them are...well...a bit hard to swallow.

looking at 1966 with the eyes of 2020 feels a bit strange. i think this is still true, but the standards are different now. someone who has a carefully-manicured trendy "alt" look might advance more than someone who has a straight-edge look, depending on the job.

today i learned you can use a soldering iron to write on polaroid photos of oscilloscope screens.

flat pack IC packages were a pain to work with.

there are keyboards...and there are keyboards.

in the 1960s there was some controversy over the new unit names (this is when cycles per second became Hertz, etc). why was the old unit for conductance (1/resistance) named the "mho"? well, that's just "ohm" backwards!

interesting article on the nuclear threat. i guess the idea of dispersal was a side benefit of the suburbs.

this editorial was written in 1966, but parts of it sound oddly familiar.

here's an early DIP IC package from TI (1966). i really like the cutaway view.

quad flat pack IC packages from, err, American Lava Corporation?!?

this zener diode ad features a nice annotated cutaway view.

auto safety was a controversial issue in the 1960s! it's interesting to look back at the arguments for and against the various safety measures.

oh look another crackpot from some funny organization advocating a weird alternative system of units--oh wait, this is basically how we do it now

orderly meetings are best

some more unusual TI packages from the 1960s. the TO-92 would have been fairly new at the time.

this trimmer potentiometer ad features a lovely cutaway view!

ahh, committee meetings. point 2 is what happened at PG&E according to the summary report i read recently.

everything in this article is useful and just as applicable today as it was in 1966.

the five dollar nixie tube!

this understated little blurb announced the first commercial LED to the world.

😂

where are these US high speed trains? well, people love their cars and air travel got really, really cheap.

the first commercial red LED. the price? $116 each! (after inflation)

here's a rather odd component. this is an electrochemical integrator. when you pass current through it, it migrates mercury from one electrode to the other.

another nice cutaway cross section in an ad.

the Mathatron.