Eric's Beijing Diary

Why do we study tubes? Well, before the development of transisters, and then semiconductor chips (which have the equivalent of thousands and millions of vacuum tubes), tubes were the work horses of electronic devices such as radios. So radios were much bigger than they are now, and also ran much hotter. So to begin to understand the way things are done now, we need to take a step back in time and see how the great grandfather of modern semiconductors worked.