(Phys.org)—Although vacuum tubes were the basic components of early electronic devices, by the 1970s they were almost entirely replaced by semiconductor transistors. But in the past few years, ...

When most people think about vacuum tubes, they picture big glass bottles glowing inside antique radios or early computers. History often treats tubes as a dead-end technology that was suddenly swept ...

Way back in the salad days of digital computing (the 1940s and '50s), computers were made of vacuum tubes -- big, hot, clunky devices that, when you got right down to it, were essentially glorified ...

In the 1800s, when pneumatic tubes shot telegrams and small items all around buildings and sometimes small cities, the future of mass transit seemed clear: we'd be firing people around through these ...

Researchers from UC San Diego are using vacuum tube technology to develop more efficient computer processors. The research could result in faster microelectronic devices and better solar panels. Their ...

The transistor revolutionized the world and made the abundant computing we now rely on a possibility, but before the transistor, there was the vacuum tube. Large, hot, power hungry, and prone to ...