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2008-07-08 Photon Zone
Posted by AnubisTTP

Another wave of new items have been added to the website * Solid State Indicators: Three new vintage LEDs, including a very early green model. * Microwave Oscillator Tubes: Raytheon QK291 Ka-band tunable klystron. * Filament Displays:IEE 220H-6409-B-328 One-Plane Readout and the tiny Wamco KW-105 minitron. We also have a few spare samples of the KW-105, which we have made available for purchase in our eBay store.

2008-06-03 The Internet is a Series of Tubes!
Posted by AnubisTTP

We have added several new scientific apparatus to the Gas Discharge Tubes section: a Crookes cathode ray tube and two spectrum tubes that appear mundane in function, but are constructed with very unusual envelopes. Other new tubes to appear on the site are the General Electric GL-6452 x-band reference cavity and the uranium-doped Eimac CIM-481274 vacuum capacitor. Not every new item to appear in this update is a tube however. We have added a vintage and strange Motorola LED, which is packaged in a red epoxy TO-92 case, to the Solid State Indicators section.

2008-05-19 The Spoils of War
Posted by Accutron

Hamvention 2008 was pretty weak. Vendor attendance was significantly lower than in recent years, and I have a special *go to hell* saved for all of the gold scrappers out there who, within a two year span, have made it virtually impossible to find affordable used HP test equipment or gold-on-ceramic IC chips. Screw you and your ilk, you are destroyers of history and a cancer on society. You should try something more dignified and appropriate to your regressive species, like stealing the copper mains out of abandoned buildings and selling them for meth money. Soapbox aside, we managed to find a few good things scattered about the sea of excruciatingly boring ham radio gear and staggeringly overpriced test equipment. 2008 turned out to be a very good year for klystrons; we brought home a Raytheon RK2K25, Varian V-153, Varian VA-220G and the highly impressive Varian VA-806F water-cooled klystron. We also found a Western Electric 730A magnetron. As a result, the Microwave Oscillator Tubes page has received a major update, with entries for these new devices as well as new, better photographs of some pre-existing devices. Other noteworthy Hamvention finds include an original Haydu 6700 magnetic beam switching tube, and a rare C.P. Clare XG-1288 cermet spark gap tube.

2008-05-14 The Pre-Game Show
Posted by Accutron

Well, Dayton Hamvention 2008 is impending, which means we're pretty busy gearing up for it, but we've managed to add a few new items in the past week, including some argon laser tubes and a couple new microwave oscillator tubes. We've also added the Hamamatsu R444 circular-cage PMT, one of the smallest of such devices ever constructed. We'll be at Hamvention all day, all three days, weather permitting. If you see somebody in a decadecounter.com MO-10R t-shirt, walking around with another guy wearing a straw hat, pushing around a shopping cart full of totally awesome electronics crap, that would be us.

2008-04-20 The Goggles Do Nothing
Posted by Accutron

Okay, I admit that we've been wrapped up in some definitively non-vintage technology lately. We've been building a couple projects using some extremely modern Lamina Ceramics RGB light engines. They may not be old, but they are very, very bright.

2008-04-16 Canned Diodes
Posted by AnubisTTP

We have added several new LEDs to the Solid State Indicators section, all of which feature metal can style packages. The TLMP 9210, TLMP 9310, and TLMP 9710 are a series of nearly modern, hermetically sealed LEDs which use a metal TO-46 package. The Soviet-made 3L341 is a green metal and epoxy packaged LED that was manufactured shortly before the fall of the Soviet Union. We have also added a very rare Monsanto MDA-111 display module, an integrated character generator and driver for the Monsanto MAN-2 bitmapped LED display.

2008-03-19 New Items
Posted by AnubisTTP

We have added several unusual new items to the site over the past few weeks. The Burroughs SD-11 is a sphericular optical display, a niche numeric display device that may look like a projection display, but does not function even remotely like one. ETL's GS12C is one of the most unusual dekatrons that the company ever made, a base 12 selector with a rare 'maintenance' style base, which has lugs instead of pins for easy direct connection of wire leads. We have also added a number of Western Electric integrated circuits to the Solid State Logic section.

2008-02-28 Your PC Asplode
Posted by Accutron

Well, early last week I finally lost a hard-fought battle against a very nasty malware package, and our main business PC went down, hard. This thing has worked itself into the boot sector on my hard drive, and due to the logistics of daily life it probably won't be fixed for a couple more days. Anyway, we lost about 6 weeks of data (not affecting the webserver), thanks to my lax backup policies. Of most importance are several E-mails we received from several different individuals (you know who you are), for whom I have now lost their contact information. So, if you've E-mailed us in the past few weeks and are wondering why we're being unresponsive asses, please contact us again so I can get back to you.

2008-02-19 Day of the Diode
Posted by AnubisTTP

The assault of new components continues, we have added two new diodes to the newly splintered Solid State Indicators section, a Western Electric Trimline 220 Series LED and a slightly humorus green epoxy diode with a red GaAs die trapped inside. We have also added a 0Z4G tube to the Gas Filled Rectifiers section and a CV359 bargraph indicator to the Variable Indicator Tubes section. Be sure to also take a look at Tiny Tetris, one of the smallest electroinc Tetris games ever made.

2008-02-14 SiC Blue
Posted by Accutron

Twenty years ago, engineers and hobbyists alike told tales of the mythical blue LED, the Kwisatz Haderach of LEDs. Silicon carbide (SiC) devices had existed in the lab for decades, but were too dim for practical use. SiC eventually made it to production, only to be quickly swept aside by the development of indium gallium nitride (InGaN) devices. InGaN LEDs are now available in any color from green to ultraviolet, and are anywhere from 100 to 1000 times brighter than SiC. SiC is no longer produced as a primary die material, only as a substrate for InGaN devices. We've also added some LED die images, under high magnification, to the Hewlett-Packard HPDL Series, HDSP-0962, HDSP-211x Series and Monsanto MAN-1 Series detail pages.

2008-02-07 Miscellaneous Bits
Posted by Accutron

Several new devices have been added, including three new Burroughs beam switching tubes: the JAN-CBSC-6700, BD-316 and BX-2004. We've also added an extremely unusual SCM Marchant M1 LSI calculator chipset to the Digital Integrated Circuits section. The M1 chipset was built by TI and AMI, and makes use of a primitive ceramic leadless carrier, possibly the first LCC ever constructed. No other ICs are known to have this carrier style.

2008-01-29 Reorganization
Posted by Accutron

The site has received a fairly major series of updates over the past week. Some articles have been moved, removed or reorganized for various reasons. The section headers in the top bar are a bit different. Component Devices and the relevant portion of the Instrumentation Museum have been combined into a singular Electronics Museum, and we have added headers linking to our pre-existing YouTube channel and eBay store. We believe the changes make the site more concise, relevant and easy to navigate. Along the way we have added several new devices: * Solid State Indicators & Displays: Hewlett-Packard HDSP-211x series intelligent displays. * Digital Integrated Circuits: Texas Instruments TMS-series calculator chips and a rare Rockwell LSI2 calculator chipset. * Display & Counting Circuits: Burroughs 101P479 programmer (Beam-X circuit). * Industrial Computers & Controllers: Texas Instruments 5TI sequencer.

2008-01-25 The Shirt
Posted by Accutron

Are you the biggest nerd in your social group? Do you get tired of explaining the importance of internal spade resistors to your less geeky friends? We have the solution, send them to our site with an awesome Burroughs MO-10R shirt, designed by world-class graphic artist Stephen Ritchie. This is an extremely high quality shirt, and photographs definitely don't do it justice. The artistic detail and print quality are absolutely unmatched. Like most artists, Steve is hungry and running low on booze. Help him out by buying our shirt!

2008-01-21 New Hybrids
Posted by Accutron

We've added several new HP parts to the Digital Integrated Circuits section, most notably the rare 5061-3010 and 5061-3001 hybrid microprocessors. The -3010 is the original 82-pin hybrid designed for the HP 9825A, while the -3001 is an advanced 107-pin variant which adds an Address Extension Chip. Combined with the -3011 microcode variant previously documented, this completes the series of known production hybrid microprocessors. We've also added several anonymous HP IC's, including some very odd 18xx-series perforated LCC's with grey traces, and some 1AAx-series LCC's.

2008-01-05 British Invasion
Posted by AnubisTTP

We have added three more dekatrons to the Glow Transfer Counting Tubes section: the GC12/4B, GC10D and GC10/4C. The GC12/4B may look like a normal Ericsson dekatron, but it has unusual internal function. Unlike most dekatrons, the GC12D has the ability to perform base-12 counting instead of base-10. The GC10D is one of the few British argon-filled dekatrons, and is even more noteworthy because it still contains its original gas. The GC10/4C is a standard neon bidirectional counter, but has a unique compact envelope and base that separates it from its more common 'B' suffixed brothers.

©2007-2008 The Vintage Technology Association. All rights reserved.

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