retroelectro
Joint electron tube engineering council In 1944, several major manufacturers and groups gathered to create the Joint Electron Tube Engineering Council, known today as JEDEC. [4] From 1944 to 1947, the group focused on standardizing all aspects of manufacturing, including plate thickness, materials, base and socket types, and part designations. As a result, the RCA numbering system was recommended to replace all other systems in the United States. Europe would continue using its existing systems. In 1948, then chairman of JETEC, Virgil M. Graham said, ‘As JETEC is a unique organization, deriving its authority and responsibility from two-parent associations whose views and methods of
operation are so widely divergent, I believe that it is an important tribute to those who conceived and organized JETEC that it has worked so well and accomplished so much for the industry in the few years of its operation.’
The first ‘2Nxx’ transistors Electrical manufacturers geared to war production By the late 1930s, RCA’s part numbering system had become a generally accepted standard in the United States. However, other companies, the military, and European companies stubbornly used their own proprietary systems. During World War 2, the lack of a consistent standard numbering system across the industry became a mission-readiness problem.
Bell Labs and Western Electric
In the early 1950s, there was a rush to make the first commercially viable transistor. Bell Labs developed the first point-contact transistor in 1947. Western Electric, the manufacturing subsidiary of AT&T, was positioned to work with the new technology earliest. Bell Telephone Laboratories and Western Electric were both subsidiaries of AT&T, enabling a quick transition from development to production. The story goes that engineers at Western Electric needed a way to number their production designs and decided to use the existing JETEC standard for naming vacuum tubes as inspiration. An early example of this is the Western Electric 2N23 Germanium Bead Transistor. [5] According to the standards used for vacuum tubes at the time, the character ‘N’ was used for non-standard (other) type bases, but since vacuum tubes were well standardized by this point, there were very few needs for this character any longer.
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