These days, an iPod with two ear buds typically provides portable music for the young and young-at-heart. Half a century ago, however, it was one plug in the ear, and the other end of the wire ran to ...

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 ...

Today pocket transistor radios manufactured in the 1950s are very collectable. Some models are highly sought after by collectors and regularly sell for hundreds of dollars. It is not uncommon to find ...

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 ...

This piece by Steve Greenberg is part of a series of essays to mark the 50th anniversary of the Beatles' first American television appearance on CBS's "The Ed Sullivan Show." It culminates with CBS ...

Growing up is daunting. All those “rites of passage” through which we must travel. The first day of school, exams, dating, awkward holidays with distant relatives. Speaking to young people I find that ...

When a Hackaday article proclaims that its subject is a book you should read, you might imagine that we would be talking of a seminal text known only by its authors’ names. Horowitz and Hill, perhaps, ...

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 ...

Had Capitol Records stuck to its original launch plan for the Beatles' "I Want to Hold your Hand," the insanity which gripped American teens could never have happened in time for the Ed Sullivan ...

A handheld AM or FM radio. All handheld radios, as well as desktop radios, use transistors, both discrete as well as contained in chips. The transistor radio was one of the first consumer devices that ...