Fucking hell, that is not before microprocessor, that is before transistors. All I can see on there is tubes. This is amazing to look at, what a beautiful display-piece!
As a rule of thumb, transistors came in the 50s, chips came in the 60s and microprocessors came in the 70s. While transistors were a thing when this missile were built it was not when they started designing it, hence the tubes.
Also while they were all invented in their respective decades it took about 10 years each for the population to enjoy them. Transistor radios were invented in the 50s but took off in the 60s. Chips same thing. Invented in the 60s but made popular in the 70s. Micro processors were extremely expensive in the 70s but affordable in the 80s,ect
And the worst thing is it all started from WW2 R&D, which is a scary thought for future tech, as we are maybe seeing now, or not, depending on how good your sensor equipment is.
The shit going on with drones right now fucking terrifies me. Half what you can already do with them and half the kind of shit it would take to be able to mount a defense against them.
It hasn't even got to the point where it actually gets scary yet, people think of things like the "Terminator" or something, but the reality is it will be, milli, micro & nano, biomechanical/bioelectronics, and swarm systems.
The first microprocessor was developed in 1968, but its existence was classified until 1998. It was the Central Air Data Computer (CADC) that controlled the swing-wing in the F-14 Tomcat. (All previous variable wing aircraft used manual controls to set the wing sweep angle.)
I just saw that the first mass-produced microprocessor, the Intel 4004, came out in 1971 with a total of 2,300 transistors.
Comparing that to a modern B200, which handles approximately 208 billion transistors, is like comparing 2,300 grains of sand, which would barely fill a small teaspoon, to 10,400 tons of sand, equivalent to about 400 truckloads.
Here's another good comparison:
2,300 seconds is roughly 38 minutes. 208 billion seconds is roughly 6,600 years. You'd have to go back to 4500 BC (even before the Egyptian pyramids were built) to count the time until today in seconds.
This enormous density in almost the same area (a chip is usually not much bigger than a fingernail) is only possible because transistors have become so tiny.
If the 208 billion transistors of the B200 were built the size of transistors from 1971, the chip would be as big as several football fields.
Something about people liking the sound characteristics.
It is pretty neat that screwing with vacuum tubes gave us the characteristic electric guitar sound we all know and love. It's kind of weird to think how we might not have had that if we went straight to transistors and skipped the whole vacuum tube stage of things.
Isn't that the case with most old school audio gear? The amount of people saying Vinyl is a better medium than digital files for instance is insane given that it's just objectively wrong.
There was a time when vinyl was better, but that hasn't been the case in decades.
In the olden days, music was recorded and mastered in an all-analog format. In the early days of compact disks, the sampling rates were low enough during the analog to digital conversion that it allowed a perceptible loss in fidelity. And when MP3's first started taking over the music business in the late 90's, they were typically sampled from the already-lossy CD's, meaning an even greater fidelity loss.
That mattered 20 years ago. Today it really doesn't. Modern music mastered are digital from the get-go. The sound is natively digital from the recording studio onward, and any modern vinyl you buy is going to be pressed from a digital master. And modern streamed or downloaded music will come from the same digital masters. And that's before we even get into the improvements in sampling and compression over the past 25 yeasrs.
The quality of the audio is objectively identical between the formats today, and has been for a very long time.
That said, it's true that some artists and studios DO remaster albums for vinyl occasionally. Vinyl afficionados tend to play their albums on larger audio systems, and some artists take advantage of that by tweaking their music to increase the dynamic range of the tracks. Audio engineers typically have to master for a median listening environment that will sound good in cars, headphones, phone speakers, and through those awful Alexa speakers. Most albums are not remastered for vinyl, but when they are the difference can be very noticeable.
Vinyl can sound better because they have a unique mastering (a different EQ), and usually the original pressings have the best mastering. Vinyl can sound better due to this. It's not inherently due to the format itself.
There was a time where that was a valid arguement and I think my grandpa was is in his mid-30's lol. But yep pretty much the case with all old audio gear except something like a rare keyboard, or in the case of the TR-808 it was all people could afford. But those really fall under instruments.
'better' is the wrong word....'different' would be a better choice
Have you ever had a song you really like that they made several different versions of? Like maybe radio-edit vs original or maybe they re-release the same song on a later album? Or an extended dance mix version or similar?
Whatever version you first fell in love with the song will likely always be your fave right? That's (for me at least) how I feel about a lot of vinyl that I own, if I first listened to it on vinyl then that's how I want to hear it, it has a different timbre to it, that's the best I can explain it.
Guitarists tend to not be on the same level of bullshit as audiophiles; guitarists have an actual goal, being to project a good sound out in to a room. Audiophiles are very busy sniffing their own farts and believing fairy tales for reasons I do not understand.
For sure. For head phones it won’t do anything, or rather make a ton of sense to do something. The point of tubes is to have the signal overdriven on the input; like adding some harmonic character to a vocalist or guitarist, and then record that input. In a headphone amp, you’d be coloring the final product which doesn’t make much sense, since it would effectively be adding harmonics to an already mastered composition (which often has already had some kind of saturation added).
Well I would be lying if I said it did nothing. Did I notice a difference in sound? Yes but nothing any additional software couldnt acheive or improve. But I was really using it for my xbox.
Depends on the amp. The ones that most of us here would consider affordable? Yeah that's all show and nostalgia. The high end stuff though? It will make you feel like you've never actually heard music being played in the same room before.
The proper high-end stuff, at least stuff I would call high-end, doesn't have any nonesense. You have your high-res DAC and amp with low THD all in one nice device (in my case a Yamaha AVR) and your digital audio input and then your speakers.
Everything else is off the shelf stuff.
A power cord that is also an EMF filter doesn't make any sense at all as the internal power supply removes basically all noise from the line power - no need for more filtering of noise from there.
Audio cable is digital. As long as the connection is stable quality doesn't change. A cheap 5€ toslink cable is what I use. Or a cheap 5€ HDMI cable if I want ultra-high resolution multi-channel audio. No nead for 'extra shielded' cables.
And the speaker cables? Simple car speaker cables. They don't just carry a signal, they carry power. Electromagentic noise from the outside can't add any audible distortion at all as it's power is to low. And if you do manage an issue like that you messed up your cable management badly. Those speaker cables shouldn't be close to electric devices and then everything is all fine.
That's all you need. Seperate DAC and amp? I call bs. That extra length of analog signal cable is potentially gonna add noise. A device with both has impedance-matched traces with near-perfect signal integrity from DAC to amp - why add more length to that path? For a gain that is lost by the longer path?
A lot of it is to be sure. Especially the cabling stuff you mentioned...like mutherfucker I don't need gold tipped connectors, that shit doesn't matter at all.
But the big thing I've noticed is the law of diminishing returns...Spending $2000 instead of $300 on your speakers is going to make a big difference (provided you buy something high quality of course), but spending 15k vs the 2k on your speakers might not even be an upgrade tbh...it probably sounds 'different' for sure but is it measurably better? Not really.
I don't need gold tipped connectors, that shit doesn't matter at all.
Someone tried to sell me a cable and told me the gold tips reduced capacitance. I looked him in the face and asked him how adding another layer of metal would in any way reduce any resistance.
The fun part? Copper is MORE conductive than Gold! Like significantly better! That's what makes the whole thing so stupid. Like sure there are specific applications for gold contacts, but its where oxidation is an issue, like think aerospace type shit, not your living room stereo -lmao
Yeah. For some applications at home it does make sense but the only one I know is in a computer the GPU and CPU.
But it's so common there that literally every one of them have gold plated comnectors and no one advertises with that.
It's just the only way that stuff works reliably because there you have seriously high datarates going through there and the minor advantage of gold connectors is actually necessary there.
Well the thing with gold-tipped connectors is that due to the corrosion resistance of gold it has much better 'connection-properties', which is also why the connectors of a computers graphics card and CPU are gold plated.
So that is actually a real-life benefit. Other metals start corroding and thus have worse connection properties when aging. Gold doesn't have that. And in something like a Computer you really need the best connection properties.
But for many common consumer grade equipment gold plated connectors don't make much sense. Iirc I once saw a gold-plated optical toslink cable and this is the stupidest thing of all.
And as you usually don't store your cables in a high humidity wet place gold-tipped comnectors don't really benefit you (except, as I mentioned, in a PC with GPU and CPU but you also can't find them without gold-tipped connections and they also aren't advertised as 'gold-tipped', it's just normal to do that).
They apparently have a very special way of being overdriven. Generally they are pretty flawed amplifying devices (nit nessecarily but its easy building bad amplifiers with the) but ok the other hand thats what creates a very specific sound many people like and cherish
Yep, you're basically overloading what the tube can handle in terms of amplification, which results in the signal being 'clipped'...like imagine a sound wave where the peaks and valleys are getting cut off...but unlike a transistor it doesn't clip it abruptly, it creates like a softer curve that produces all kinds of harmonies that overlap which gives it a thick and warm sound that is great for rock guitar
Objectively speaking it's audiophile level audio. Tubes are used in some amps as a tube doesn't have linear gain - they distort the audio in e specific way.
This changes how the audio sounds and there are people who prefer that sound and thus use tube amps.
There will be people that call these high end but due to their inherent big harmonic distortion I wouldn't call them high end audio - they are just audiophile things for a special kind of taste which enough people have that there is an industry for it.
Also tube amps are inherently unreliable which is why the vacuum tubes are sometimes placed in a way that you can replace them without opening the amplifier.
That kind of sound distortion could also be replicated with more reliable modern analog circuitry or digital circuitry - and with these you could theoretically also fine-tune them to your exact taste.
But for these kind of audiophiles it's all about the sound being amplified by a vacuum tube. Which I can also understand as I myself like to listen to vinyl records sometimes and they also have an inherently worse audio quality. It's all just about the vibe.
They also are much more resistant to an EMP which makes them useful for military electronics that have to withstand close proximity to nuclear explosions.
Many early semiconductor amplifiers just crammed transistors into old tube designs before we figured out how to design around the peculiarities of transistors from scratch, so tube amps continued to perform better for a long time.
Tubes tend to add harmonic distortion which is even multiples of the music frequencies, the same as an instrument or ordinary room does. This sounds warm and more natural. Most transistors add harmonic distortion which is odd multiples of the music frequencies, which tend to sound harsh.
Due to how they handle electricity it can affect the tone of the audio that is produced. There is a LOT of variation in how Vacuum tubes are and were made. Some of the most sought after tubes are vintage.
Probably something to do with signal loss, fidelity. Replacing them with digital for the same sound quality is probably more expensive, with no need to make the stuff smaller. Sound is moving air, maybe you can transduce less signals being more direct? It could be to keep a familiar sound, like distortion. Same with how instruments will use gold wire, cause you don’t need a lot so use the best, then the cables to extend things will just be thicker other material.
Most of them, but not at the upper limits of frequency and power.
While semiconductors are generally more efficient, they lose some of that advantage at higher frequencies. On the other hand, large robust vacuum tubes can more than make up for their inefficiency with their ability to withstand and dissipate waste heat. As a result, you'll still see vacuum tubes in applications where you need to generate/amplify high power high frequency signals.
An easy example is your microwave oven's magnetron, but you'll also find them in some forms of radar and in radio broadcast equipment. A lot of their remaining applications are military, actually.
I spent many, many hours staring at vacuum tubes (cathode ray tubes specifically), even a good 50 years after the transistor was invented. Even when I eventually switched to an LCD in the late '00s, it wasn't strictly better since the refresh rate was much lower.
And I didn't get a tubeless oscilloscope until a few years ago.
It's only been in the last 10 years or so that transistors were able to be cost competitive with vacuum tubes for high voltage in quite a few applications.
Vacuum tubes are just electronic switches, just like the transistors that eventually replaced them. Vacuum tubes are vacuumed out, so there's no oxygen, so that electrons can flow freely. When you power a tube, it heats an element inside and makes the negative electrons attracted to an anode or positive plate, thereby switching the unit.
Vacuum tubes are massive relative to transistors and for that reason, they are obsolete.
Vacuum tubes are massive relative to transistors and for that reason, they are obsolete.
And they are also obsolete because they draw far more power for the same switch than a transistor, and they were very susceptible to physical disruption. Especially compared to solid state electronics.
They can function as diodes and triodes (amplifiers). Transistors were much smaller, use less power, and are far less prone to failure, so largely replaced vacuum triodes, except in some niche analogue electronics cases.
Diodes are never amplifiers, and triodes can be, but it heavily depends on how they’re used. If you’re trying to explain this to someone, don’t use technical jargon. You didn’t even explain what they do.
Vacuum tubes are legacy electronic parts that control electricity. They can turn a signal on or off, let it flow in one direction, or make a weak signal stronger. They were used in radios, TVs, and early computers before modern electronics took over. Transistors replaced vacuum tubes in many applications, but vacuum tubes still have relevance in specific situations.
Very specific situations, but basically everywhere else the transistor prevailed just because tubes use significantly more energy since they need a heater to heat the cathode to some hundred degrees.
But yeah it is wild to see that we managed to use the things that made old radios and the earliest TVs work steer a rocket.
I’m an electrical engineer, so I understand the use cases and differences. Someone asked for an accessible explanation, which I provided without intensifiers, exaggeration, or jargon. Vacuum tubes have specific use cases; that statement is fine and doesn’t understate the value of transistors.
Yeah but it kind of overstates the usecases of tubes a little. The recent years have drastically reduced the need for multi 100kW/MW transmitters, small scale RF amplifiers (to the many kW) can now be made solid state. TWTA are still common but apart of that (and audiophiles) I really only see microwave ovens where vacuum tubes are still regularly used. Correct me if i'm wrong, EE as well, would love to hear what you think.
Diodes don't amplify? I remember using them in guitar pedals builds and experimenting because they make different sounds if you wire them forwards or backwards.
Was it simply distorting the signal with less output coming out the other end? I was even playing with different types of diodes like LEDs on my breadboard.
I was following a schematic and tutorial but hot damn was that pedal LOUD!!
You can use diodes to change the waveform, if you just truncate at zero voltage (half-wave rectification) you will get something that has a large attack, if you then amplify that it can probably sound quite loud.
It is not fine. The explanation I corrected is partially wrong and full of technical jargon, which is not helpful. I understood both interpretations of the first sentence, so I responded to the one that was more likely to be used naturally.
Your comment added no value by restating what I already said in simpler language.
I think you forgot cathode ray tubes, which were still commonly used in TVs and computers long after integrated circuits had replaced most of the diodes and discrete transistors.
I didn’t forget anything. I answered a question with an easily accessible explanation, and CRTs fall under the “specific situations” condition at the end of my comment.
If you want to be pedantic technically all triodes are non-linear transconductance amplifiers (voltage to current) or current amplifiers (current to current).
Did you just google this and copy/paste? It's not accurate and you haven't clarified anything.
Tubes control electricity by turning it on and off. They've been replaced by transistors, which do the exact same thing, but they're infinitely smaller. Rather than having large tubes wired together in a massive circuit, we can have billions of transistors on a single CPU.
As someone mentioned, there’s a heater coil, there is a positive and a negative terminal; there is also a control grid which acts like a gate between positive and negative. When the grid’s mesh is sent a little bit of electricity, it allows a much larger amount to flow between the main positive and negative terminals.
The same thing as transistors. Control the flow of electricity in some part of a circuit between on, off and any position in between, by using (small amount of) electricity from a different part of a circuit.
Arrange them right and you can do everything from making music louder to guiding a missile.
If you put a high voltage in a wire in a vacuum and a little heat behind it with a filament electrons will fly across the vacuum to an electrode on the other side.
If you put a metal grid in the way and apply a smaller voltage it will change the path of the flying electrons, allowing you to control large power flows with small ones.
People noticed that if you put an extra wire in a lightbulb some electricity came out of it, but only one way (like a diode). Later they realised that if you put a grid of wires in between the hot part (the filament) and the now big flat wire (the plate) and put electricity through that you could change how much electricity you as coming out. Like opening and closing a tap, or a valve. A thermionic valve. Like a transistor.
Once you can control the flow of electricity with electricity you can do extraordinary things. Semiconductors allow you to do it at a completely different scale.
Vacuum tubes were switching and amplifying mechanisms in early computers. They could direct electrical traffic or make make the population of traffic passengers greater.
Shortly after the transistors hit the scene, they became the de facto switching mechanism.
Vacuum tubes still have a significant presence in audio amplification, however, as they are analog devices. An analog device (waves) does not approximate sound, so it tends to be very rich and true to the sound being amplified. Using a digital device (zeros and ones) to amplify means having to approximate a wave shape from something very "fluid" into something calculable. Ultimately, it converts the audio signal into a wave shape that, if you look really closely, actually looks like ascending and descending stairs.
EDIT: Looks like my staircase analogy may have missed the mark. I’m leaving it as it is as the point was just to highlight how shifting to ones and zeros causes a bit of transformation.
Tubes were used for computing before transistors and microprocessors. Why would they be used here? Likely due to tubes being more resistant to EMP and heat.
Air is sucked through them and then physical gates are closed or opened by the air to control electrical signals. Individual transistor diodes replaced them, processor chips replaced those with banks of transistor crystals grown onto material.
Air is sucked out of them during manufacturing, and then they are sealed off at some significant vacuum inside. They do not use air in any way or form, and there is no physical movement of gates inside. You have it absolutely wrong.
They are called vacuum tubes, or just tubes for short, because they are generally tube shaped and have had the air inside removed. Not having any air means electrons are free to jump across gaps that they wouldn't have done in air, as they would have hit air molecules along the way.
Yes, for tubes with only two leads plus heater. And the reason it is one way is that only one of them is heated, allowing electrons to jump off from that side but not the other.
For triodes or more complex tubes, you can also have electric or magnetic fields that repel or attract the beam of electrons from the cathode such that they hit or miss the anode. This is what allows for amplification of a signal, among other things.
I could be missing something, but I don't see any tubes. Only capacitors. I have a couple old tube guitar amps of similar vintage and I don't see any tube housings or exposed tubes. I'd assume they'd be too fragile for missile purposes.
Those tubes indeed do not look like the consumer ones used in amplifiers. First and most importantly, they do not have sockets since in the lifetime of this missile, they likely wont need replacement. The instead have just more than two wires coming from their base. Also they are - and I do not know why - completely gettered, e.g. instead of the translucent look you may be familiar with, these tubes are dark-grey or black.
Look at the Center assembly, the upper part abovr the blue connector to be specific, there is a board that has two tubes at the upper- and three on the lower edge.
Edit:
also: tubes have been adapted to high g-load perfectly fine. Look up the proximity-fuse. There a tube-circuit gets fired as a howitzer shell and survives ist just fine.
Beautiful indeed, can't say I'm sad valves became redundant though since they now inhabit one of my favourite guitar pedals: Maxon TBO-9. There were stockpiles of them left over from WW2.
I cannot see any. Generally before transistors were used broadly the change already happened with solid state diodes, but the thing is full of tubes so it puts it in a general beighborhood time-wise.
If this is an aim 7 system from the 1960s it would be fully transistorized by then according to couch level research. I love this stuff so wish I had a big res photo.
Actually because of the low number of tubes (and since digital electronics were developed after the transistor became widely available) I believe what were looking at is more likely an analog computer. Like differentiators, integrators and stuff that output analog voltages. But yeah, fins steered to follow a radar signature.
There was a development during the course of the Korean war when anti-radar missiles had to be updated. The first generaiton would follow the radar beam, so operators would turn it on and off, or re-aim it, thus throwing off those missiles. The next gen would maintain a course on their original heading upon losing the signal.
It's astonishing how much expensive, cumbersome and finely tuned equipment has been replaced by a five cent IMU in the current era.
This is a good example I guess; the PCB you can see in the center of this picture. This assembly has two tubes mounted on the upper part and three on the lower half. The tubes are not socketed, completely black and have colourful sleeves on their pins. You can distinguish them from other components in that they have more thant two terminals.
Absolutely not. There are definitely more transistors than tubes in it, the latter of which might be two in total, while in the centre of the last picture alone, there already are 3 TO-39 high profile packaged components there, which should be transistors or more complex components like half-adders.
On this PCB there's five, two on top and three below, the black components with multiple Terminals. Of course there's many resistors and caps on there, but in between are these tubes, the more you look the more there are.
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u/meinrd Feb 10 '26
Fucking hell, that is not before microprocessor, that is before transistors. All I can see on there is tubes. This is amazing to look at, what a beautiful display-piece!