(Phys.org)—Although vacuum tubes were the basic components of early electronic devices, by the 1970s they were almost entirely replaced by semiconductor transistors. But in the past few years, ...

A vacuum tube, known as the first electronic device, is used to switch, amplify, or commutate electric signals. In the past, vacuum tubes functioned as a main part of a diverse range of electronic ...

Way back in the salad days of digital computing (the 1940s and '50s), computers were made of vacuum tubes -- big, hot, clunky devices that, when you got right down to it, were essentially glorified ...

When most people think about vacuum tubes, they picture big glass bottles glowing inside antique radios or early computers. History often treats tubes as a dead-end technology that was suddenly swept ...

Taking a break from ogling microscopic features in Intel’s semiconductor processors, [Ken Shirriff] is back to instead poking at decidedly macroscopic pluggable modules from the 1948 IBM 604 ...

Researchers from UC San Diego are using vacuum tube technology to develop more efficient computer processors. The research could result in faster microelectronic devices and better solar panels. Their ...

Without transistors the modern world would simply not exist. But how do they work, and how do modern, atomic sized versions compare with the originals? The word "transitor" has become almost invisible ...

You can forget inventions like air conditioning, television, the computer and the Internet. The single most important invention of the 20th century was the transistor, according to some researchers ...