Check out my iPod from the '60s, which is why it has a 6T on it… '60s… 6T… get it? Okay, not really; 6T means six transistors… and it’s a radio, of course… not an iPod. Long before electronic grandeur and bragging rights were decided by gigabytes, mega-pixels, and horizontal display resolution, they were governed by the number of transistors a device contained.
Transistors replaced vacuum tubes, which means this radio was the equivalent of a radio with six vacuum tubes. And it came with a free case… unlike iPods and iPhones… whose cases range in price from crazy to ridiculous.
When I was fifteen years old, I built a five-band short-wave radio called a Knight-Star Roamer… it had five vacuum tubes… and it was one of the best presents I ever received. I'm not sure why I brought that up… I suppose I simply wanted to brag about how many vacuum tubes I once had… which was five. I have none now.
