On Monday, October 2, 2017 at 9:52:23 AM UTC-4, Chuck wrote:


I agree with everything you say except for nuvistor reliability. We
were constantly replacing them in RCA tuners back in the early 70s.

Agreed that the very earliest did suffer from poor QC. But after a pretty short shakedown, they became exceedingly reliable. The biggest problem with them was either a poor vacuum (no getters, no way to draw out air by individual tube) or loss of vacuum. As the technology progressed, these were solved to the point that were they as inexpensive as contemporary transistors, they may have survived in volume production to this day. They were very costly as compared to solid-state devices, however.

Peter Wieck
Melrose Park, PA