Happy 50 th birthday to the transistor radio. For the last half-century we’ve embraced transistor radios, loved them, made them part of our lives and even took them for granted. But back in 1954, the ...

Transistors have come a long way. Like everything else electronic, they’ve become both better and cheaper. According to a recent IEEE article, a transistor cost about $8 in today’s money back in the ...

With its "genuine superheterodyne circuit" and "standard 22½-volt battery," the Regency TR-1 not only launched portable audio, it also brought us gobbledygook technospeak. The Regency was the first ...

Jointly produced by Texas Instruments and TV accessory manufacturer IDEA (Industrial Development Engineering Associates) Corp, the TR-1 was the first consumer device to employ transistors. It was ...

Transistors have come a long way. Like everything else electronic, they’ve become both better and cheaper. According to a recent IEEE article, a transistor cost about $8 in today’s money back in the ...

It wasn’t big, it could cost about $500 in today’s terms, and it was utterly revolutionary. Today it might not seem like much, but this little gadget changed radio — and arguably youth culture itself ...

Embed <iframe src="https://www.npr.org/player/embed/4152451/4152452" width="100%" height="290" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" title="NPR embedded audio player"> We ...

They were the Walkmans of the 1950s-the coolest things ever to fit into Ban-Lon shirt pockets: snazzy transistor radios. Now these vintage examples of midcentury technology, which typically cost $30 ...

OCTOBER 18, 1954: Transistor radios hit the shelves on this day in 1954 – and went on to sell billions and become the most popular electronic communication device in history. Texas Instruments’ ...

The future began 75 years ago this week with the invention of the transistor. We’ve been looking at the ecosystems of innovation that grew the transistor into the interconnected, digital revolution.

You hear nothing but your radio. – “On Your Radio,” Richard Lanham, 1957 ON WEDNESDAY, June 29, 1948, Bell Labs called a press conference at its West St. headquarters to announce it had developed and ...

So What Was the Transistor Good For? Transistors may have been useful to the phone company and to a handful of scientists building computers, but that wasn't enough to build an industry. Companies ...