Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/07/02/teardown-of-iconic-sony-tr-63.html
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The short excerpt compares the transistor radio to an IC, which wasn’t invented yet. What the transistor radio did was replace the big, bulky, heat generating superheterodyne tube radio and shrunk it down to pocket size and able to run off a battery, a feat that was just as impressive back then as the IC is to the transistor today.
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In the mid-60’s when I was but a wee lad of about 7 or 8, we had one of these technological marvels - or something very similar - and I used to sneak it up to my room at night, where I could slip it under my pillow and listen to it when I was supposed to be sleeping. WTRU from Muskegon and WSHN from Fremont was about all it would pick up, and what I remember most clearly was being terrified, absolutely terrified, by the commercials for Flight of the Phoenix. I have no idea why …
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Flashback: Who remembers holding your transistor radio up against the bus window on cold days in order to get better reception while you rode?
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In more ways than one. $39.95 in 1957 puts it at about $364.52 today. iPod was $399 at launch (which is apparently $577.97 today; yeesh!).
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The Regency TR-1 went on sale in October 1954. It had four transistors, was made in the USA, and sold for $49.95.
Transistor radios use to brag about how many transistors they had in their marketing. I’ve heard of ones that just had a few extras soldered onto the board, unconnected to anything, just so the company could say their radio had more transistors in it.
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That’s like used car salesmen selling cars with 16 valves - 8 in the engine and 8 in the radio.
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Can confirm…I had one that was 13 transistor (about 1963). It came with a schematic…they were essentially using some as resistors 
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I do. What I also remember was a friend of mine who was the biggest cheapskate on planet earth. How much of a cheapskate? He bought a brand new car (late 80’s, early 90’s), but refused to pay for a radio (or AC) in the car and drove around with a transistor radio either on the seat next to him or pressed to his ear. He had plenty of money, he was just weird.
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This is what I like to do with these things:
There were vacuum tube pocket radios made in the mid Fifties that weren’t much bigger than this, although they were not shirt-pocket size. Perhaps coat-pocket size. They used hearing aid tubes and dry cells, and ran for about 30 minutes before the A cell for the filaments ran dead.
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They should have replaced the filament with a very strong beta emitter. Sounds like a perfect technology for the fifties
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Around 1958 my dad bought me a Channel Master 6-transistor radio, one of the first in town. He paid around $50 CDN for it, which had to be a better part of a weeks pay. Ha - found one… https://www.flickriver.com/photos/51764518@N02/46741863192/
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Interesting. Reminds me of Dieter Rams’s designs, but slightly less reduced.
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This was on my Grandpa’s desk. He got it as a gift from a paint sales engineer. The backstory is that he never even put batteries in it. My destructive cousin’s supposedly destroyed it. I found the missing parts. I attempted to “heal it”. It was too far gone to even save the pieces of case and pc board. They apparently were found jumping up and down on it. That was my first foray into electronic repair. Previously my main patients were working or
non-working clocks. I had managed to actually get the clock back together. And it worked. My career in electronic repair began then.
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Actually IC’s existed all the way back to vacuum tubes. There were integrated circuits of not just transistor junctions or cpus. The earliest ICs were just encapsulated parts. Sometimes resistors and or capacitors inside of cement or a Bakelite box. Fisher radio company was a big proponent. The used a network of diodes and resistors as a multiplex decoder. These were used in the very early stereo FM receivers. It made the circuit more stable because of temperature tracking. They were all shot by the mid 70’s. I made my own out of diodes and resistors. I encapsulated them in a thermally conductive silicone rubber. Old TVs used them extensively. When they went bad they produced prodigious amounts of green smoke. It smelled like dead fish. Some ICs were coated in a sandy cement. They died most impressively.
ICs are not just for cpus.
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You’re welcome.
First transistor radio I got, i drilled a couple holes in the back, snaked a wire through, and bingo! giant extended antenna. Yes, I opened it up first and determined which internal component was tied to the builtin antenna, and accessed that.
