February 1970 Popular Electronics
Table of Contents
Wax nostalgic about and learn from the history of early electronics. See articles
published October 1954 - April 1985. All copyrights are hereby acknowledged.
In 1970, Sylvania ran this 2-page
advertisement in Popular Electronics magazine touting the accomplishment of reducing the equivalent
of 60,000 discrete components to a mere 60 - thanks to integrated circuits. That 1,000:1 ratio
is miniscule compared to this year (2017) where AMD's 24-core
7401P sports 19,200,000,000 transistors. If
Moore's Law continues,
we can expect nearly 40 billion in another year and a half. Sylvania was not claiming to be
able to replace all components with integrated circuits, just to drastically reduce the number
of parts needed to stock for prototyping and production. Even AMD's gigaprocessor needs a
large handful of capacitors sprinkled around its periphery to function in the presence of
electrical noise and power fluctuations, and also a few steering diodes and pull-up resistors.
I don't dare make a statement like, "There will always be a need for discrete passive components,"
because bioelectronics might easily replace both discrete and integrated components with gelatinous
blobs of synapse-filled gray matter, powered by pseudo stomachs fed by frankenpellets of nutrition.
Sylvania General Telephone & Electronics Advertisement
This is 30,000 solid state replacement parts.
So is this.
It used to be if you wanted to satisfy everyone, you had to stock over 30,000 different
solid state replacement parts,
Well, everyone realized that was ridiculous. So some enterprising people came up with a
bunch of universal replacements.
Then you only had to stock about eleven or twelve hundred.
That was a lot better, but we still thought it was a little ridiculous.
So two years ago (when we went into this business) , we figured out how to replace all
30,000 with only 60.
Now all you have to do is stock 60 of our diodes, transistors, integrated circuits, etc.,
and you can replace any of the 30,000 parts now in use. Including all JEDEC types, manufacturers'
part numbers, and foreign designs.
That means you invest less money. You don't tie up valuable space.
You do away with complicated inventory control. And you operate more efficiently."
To make life even easier, we've got a new book that gives you all the cross references
you need to figure out which part replaces which.
It's available from your Sylvania distributor.
If the whole thing sounds rather incredible, you're right. But why not give your distributor
a call and let him narrow the incredibility gap.
General Telephone & Electronics
Posted August 3, 2017