Many Hackaday readers have an interest in retro technology, but we are not the only group who scour the flea markets. Alongside us are the collectors, whose interest is as much cultural as it is technological, and who seek to preserve and amass as many interesting specimens as they can. From this world comes [colectornet], with a video that crosses the bridge between our two communities, examining the so-called transistor wars of the late 1950s and through the ’60s. Just as digital camera makers would with megapixels four or five decades later, makers of transistor radios would cram as many transistors as they could into their products in a game of one-upmanship.
A simple AM transistor radio can be made with surprisingly few components, but for a circuit with a reasonable performance they suggest six transistors to be the optimal number. If we think about it we come up with five and a diode, that’s one for the self-oscillating mixer, one for IF, an audio preamplifier, and two for the audio power amplifier, but it’s possible we’re not factoring in the relatively low gain of a 1950s transistor and they’d need that extra part. In the cut-throat world of late ’50s budget consumer electronics though, any marketing ploy was worth a go. As the price of transistors tumbled but their novelty remained undimmed, manufacturers started creating radios with superfluous extra transistors, even sometimes going as far as to fit transistors which served no purpose. Our curious minds wonder if they bought super-cheap out-of-spec parts to fill those footprints.
The video charts the transistor wars in detail, showing us a feast of tiny radios, and culminating in models which claim a barely credible sixteen transistors. In a time when far more capable radios use a fraction of the board space, the video below the break makes for a fascinating watch.
Ah, thr good old days.. you could make an AM radio with a simple germanium diode and a length of wire.. place a few coils and a single transistor.. and you had a radio you could hear without a crystal earpiece.
You still can in 2024. Nothing’s stopping you!
Here are some stations you can receive if you live in South Africa. Search for your country if you live somewhere else: https://mytuner-radio.com/radio/country/south-africa-stations/frequency/am
the “radio is dead” thing is a northern hemisphere thing!
down here in the civilized side of the globe radio is alive and well
Radio is still a “Thing ” in the US. There are literally thousands of AM broadcast stations and thousands of FM broadcast stations here. The obituary for radios is very much premature.
I cannot remember the name of the magazine. It might have been printed in a 5.5 x 8.5 inch format. My father had a few issues lying around. One issue had an expose on the practice of inflating the number of transistors. They took examples of products at the time and showed how some transistors were used in place of simple diodes. In the more egregious cases, some had all three leads shorted together.
the more things change the more they stay the same!
cool story tho and a neat reminder that hoodwinking ain’t new.
It was way worse than that. I started work for Motorola Semiconductor as a product engineer in the early 70’s. Motorola had invented the TO92 package and by that time still had a major share of that market. Our Hong Kong sales office (which was also a test center) sold our test rejects (opens, shorts, out of spec … didn’t matter) literally by the pound to Chinese manufacturers so they could pad the number of “transistors” in their radios. That continued for at least a couple of years after I got there until our legal people stopped it due to liability concerns.
For when even counterfeit looked good.
To paraphrase (and modify) myself from a previous post.
Saw headline. Saw author. Read and re-read article. Learned a lot. Skipped to comments- thanks HaD and the author.
Car radios were hybrid transistor which meant they also used vqcuum tubes.
haha
GM went all transistor in 1957 (13 transistors) but went bqck to hybrid cause tubes were cheaper.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/156677605@N04/46960608235
My 1968 Dodge van had the best sounding AM radio I ever heard. Probably a tube hybrid by then, Could see the glow under the dash. Took a couple minutes to warm up, but so did the van.
…and then there was that cheap portable open-reel tape recorder of the early 1960’s that took 3″ reels and showed up under lots of different names, with only four transistors. You’ll even see it in the Get Smart TV series.
https://museumofmagneticsoundrecording.org/RecordersLloyd.html
Horrible machine. I loved mine.
Nowhere near the first time. About a hundred years ago, vacuum tube radios got the “more must be better” treatment.
At least they look really cool
Well the only piece of mediocracy I watched was the video, I mean just blaming all the manufacturers about useless transistors but:
1.-Not showing any circuit diagram,(some units had them inside)
2.-Not giving reasons why he considers those transistors in each individual radio were usesless.
3.- Stating that some of them were placed there without connections – and then not showing the back of any of them so every one can confirm.
Obviously he don’t know that much about radio and electronics.
And finally yeah, blaming the country of origin. Yeah.
I’m pretty sure old grandpas and grandmas have the most beautiful memories about they early days listening those classics radio stations. Even earing the noise can bring memories back. Go ask them.
I remember seeing transistors used as diodes in several portable radios back in the late 60s. I also remember an engineer I worked for back in my tech school days in the mid 70s just putting them in to increase the ” body count”. As a student, I asked him why they were there since they really didnt do anything and was told it was kind of a company policy. Engineers were required to remove a part to save their job and part padding was a form of job security.
Then there was the “All Japanese 6” (a variation on the earlier “All American 5”):
https://soldersmoke.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-all-japanese-6-receiver.html
My Apple M2 Max has 67 billion transistors. Still my web browsing is not faster than with my Core 2 Duo 1.66GHz with only 169 million transistors. :P
What kind of web browsing were you doing like with text only maybe but you tube that Is impossible yeah m2 max is way overkill for web browsing but a core 2 duo is quite slow nowadays
I’m old enough to remember (and experience the reality of) this bit of sarcasm:
“A 10 dollar transistor protected a 25 cent fuse by blowing first!”
I always liked the adage “Anything can be a fuse.”
Anything can be a fuse… once.
Well, most fuses can only be a fuse…once
“Give me a suitable amperage, and I shall make the entire earth a fuse”
-Archimedes if he had more electrical knowledge, probably
On the other hand, there were two-transistor pocket radio’s ,which used the ‘reflex’ circuit , AFAIK these were only sold in the USA to get round tax rules, although cheaper to manufacture with the cost of germanium transistors, presumably the inferior performance would not be satisfactory in Europe, which tended to have a smaller number of high-power transmitters, rather than a multitude of local stations.
It at least proves the value of AM broadcasting, and how anyone can afford a radio. I always keep the latest Sony issue pocket radio on hand, and I like the antique Sanyos that were built under many different names.
Reading all these comments, now I know why Radio Shack had so many customers back then
When I did my Fleet Air Arm apprenticeship in the mid sixties, our instructor had us all building a one transistor FM receiver! Essentially it was an AM receiver which was detuned so that the modulation was converted to AM on the skirt of the tuning circuit 😄