In the early days, PNP bipolar transistors were common, but the bulk of circuits you see today use NPN transistors. As [Aaron Danner] points out, many people think PNP transistors are “backward” but ...

If you open up the perennial favourite electronics textbook The Art Of Electronics and turn to the section on transistors, you will see a little cartoon. A transistor is shown as a room in which ...

In 1964, when I started working in the electronics industry, a single silicon transistor cost over £1 ($2.80 at the time, or about $22 at 2014 prices). These cheap ones were not very good and higher ...

The first transistor was about half an inch high. That's mammoth by today's standards, when 7 million transistors can fit on a single computer chip. It was nevertheless an amazing piece of technology.

In the beginning, there was the point-contact transistor. This was the very first transistor ever made, built by Walter Brattain with the help of John Bardeen. It was made of two gold foil contacts ...

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75 years ago this month, research scientists working at Bell Labs first created, then unveiled to the world a new device—the point contact transistor. Some call it the greatest invention of the 20th ...

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What is a Programmable Unijunction Transistor (PUT)? Simple – it is a three-lead electronic semiconductor device, similar to a unijunction transistor (UJT), except that its behaviour can be controlled ...

What's the most important invention in history? This is a tough question, as there are a lot of really good candidates. Fire, agriculture, writing, and many other discoveries have completely changed ...