I noticed today that I have put together 404 posts on this blog, prior to this one. That number reminds me of my long-ago past in the US Navy. Here's a clue: It comes in a can and was made from the element found between gallium and arsenic. Any guesses?
If you get this one, you are probably an incurably geeky nerd with a sense of history. But likely a nice person in spite of it.
2 comments:
You must be thinking about the "2N404 Historic Germanium Computer Transistor" described at http://semiconductormuseum.com/MuseumStore/MuseumStore_2N404_Index.htm.
Until now I'd never heard of it. When I was a kid we had a few 2N107 germanium transistors (also historic I suspect) around the house, which I used in a few simple projects. Dad got them somewhere so he could see for himself just what these new-fangled tube replacements were all about.
I had a bunch of 2N404s in my heap of stuff. They were about as common as you could get in the mid-1960s. My oldest transistor was a 2N99, which had a glass base where the wires protruded, and a soldered-on oval can. Nowadays these are collectors' items, just like the handmade one-kilobit ferrite core frames used as computer memory. We had those on the Enterprise, by the hundreds, in our four gigantic Univac computers.
Good grief—I must be old! At least the ship was nuclear powered and not made of oak.
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