The party poopers at Mullard then realised they could make some money and
started putting their transistors in opaque bodies and made the transparent
ones with a higher price tag!

They were so crude they did not often know which ones they were making,
having to test them and put them into the bin for the ones they resembled
most.

I once had a set of OC71s that had such a low capacitance they would amplify
at medium wave. My first radio microphone!

Brian

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"Don Pearce" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 14 Dec 2009 09:19:10 -0800 (PST), Engineer
wrote:

On Dec 14, 10:23 am, "David Looser"
wrote:
"Ian Bell" wrote in message

...

Don Pearce wrote:
Interesting insight into the way things were in the 60s - I've just
been reading a Wireless World from November of that year. Valves
(tubes for those across the pond) were extremely cheap. And
transistors cost pretty much the same, which is why we treated them
with kid gloves and thermal shunts when soldering them into circuits.

http://www.soundthoughts.co.uk/look/valves.jpg

Money conversion for the young and foreign:

20 shillings to the pound, 12 pence to the shilling. A price given as
5/6 meant five shillings and six pence. So an ECC84 at 6/6 is 32.5
pence in today's money. A 28012 transistor, by contrast at 140/- is
seven pounds - getting on for half the weekly wage of some people
back
then.

I may post some ads for complete equipment later, just to make you
cry.

d

I have some WW from 1940 to 46 - I'll see if I can find a camparison
page.

Valve prices didn't change much in money terms between the 1930s and the
1960s. There might have been a slight reduction, but not a lot. Of
course
inflation was low during that time too. Transistors on the other hand
dropped dramatically in price and carried on doing so for a long time.
An
article I have from a 1952 edition of 'Radio Constructor' refers to
"some
(transistors) the writer recently obtained from the USA cost almost as
much
as a miniature receiver". Whilst these days a bag of 100 BC548s costs
but a
few pennies each.

David.

Ian

Way, way back, I nearly cried when I fried an OC71 in an audio stage I
was trying to make!

They were down to 5 Bob by 1966 - absolute bargain, particularly when
you scraped the paint off and used them for a photo transistor. I
first discovered this by accident when an amplifier I had made hummed
when I took the hardboard cover off the back.

d