Articles named as found on MSNBC newspage links to Newsweek. Still thought you might enjoy! [Article Begins...] The Irresistible Transistor Fifty years ago this month, a man embraced his inner hobbyist and gave thousands of engineers their first transistor By Harry Goldstein Is it possible to love a transistor? Certainly what Jack Ward feels for the Raytheon CK722, the first transistor sold to the general public, goes beyond casual affection. He's collected thousands of early transistor specimens, including dozens of CK722s. His stately yellow Victorian home on a quiet, tree-lined street in Brookline, Mass., has a basement crammed with enough code oscillators, Geiger counters, radios, hand- wrought circuit boards, transistorized hearing aids, subminiature vacuum tubes, diodes, resistors, and capacitors to make any collector of vintage electronic gear drool. He's written one book about the CK722 and has started another about early transistor history at RCA. When he's not working as associate director of quality for the Bedford, Mass., facility of gene-chip maker Affymetrix Inc., he's busy maintaining his virtual Transistor Museum on the Web and is widely acknowledged by fellow collectors as a techno- anthropologist par excellence. [...Article Ends] Cheers! Ed Tillman Store Automation Tech Support Specialist Valero Energy Corporation San Antonio, Texas, USA Office: (210)592-3110, Fax (210)592-2048 Email: edward.tillman(a)valero.com <mailto:edward.tillman@valero.com> [demime 1.01a removed an attachment of type image/bmp which had a name of Valero5.bmp]