When a Hackaday article proclaims that its subject is a book you should read, you might imagine that we would be talking of a seminal text known only by its authors’ names. Horowitz and Hill, perhaps, ...

Baldwinsville, NY -- In 1953, the cutting edge of technology was the transistor, and General Electric’s plant in Salina was where theory was being turned into reality. A team of engineers led by ...

These days, an iPod with two ear buds typically provides portable music for the young and young-at-heart. Half a century ago, however, it was one plug in the ear, and the other end of the wire ran to ...

They were the Walkmans of the 1950s-the coolest things ever to fit into Ban-Lon shirt pockets: snazzy transistor radios. Now these vintage examples of midcentury technology, which typically cost $30 ...

So What Was the Transistor Good For? Transistors may have been useful to the phone company and to a handful of scientists building computers, but that wasn't enough to build an industry. Companies ...

This piece by Steve Greenberg is part of a series of essays to mark the 50th anniversary of the Beatles' first American television appearance on CBS's "The Ed Sullivan Show." It culminates with CBS ...

It wasn’t big, it could cost about $500 in today’s terms, and it was utterly revolutionary. Today it might not seem like much, but this little gadget changed radio — and arguably youth culture itself ...

If you cultivate an interest in building radios it’s likely that you’ll at some point make a simple receiver. Perhaps a regenerative receiver, or maybe a direct conversion design, it’ll take a couple ...

Happy 50 th birthday to the transistor radio. For the last half-century we’ve embraced transistor radios, loved them, made them part of our lives and even took them for granted. But back in 1954, the ...