- - Bill - - exray@coquidotnet wrote:
Scott Dorsey wrote:

You guys are triggering my failing memory. I vaguely remember these
things...something like a black ice-cube with a little wires coming out
of them. Price was something like $1.29-$2.59. I'm struggling to think
of where I saw a magazine article about ho-rigging about three of these
together for something like an AM broadcaster or some such gizmo.
Woulda had to be PE, EI or R-TV-Experimenter in the mid-late 60s since
that was all I had access to.


Everybody and his brother made them. Philbrick, Hewlett-Packard, and
Opamp Labs are some of the ones that are still around today. But
ITI up in Maryland, Solid State Electronics Corporation, Modular Audio
Products. Oh yeah, and Burr-Brown got their start doing this kind of
thing. I think Stephens, the company that later made 2" tape machines,
also started out doing amplifier modules.

Well, in perspective, it sounds like some sort of cheapo stuff that
never really caught on...like those early TenTec modules.

It did sort of catch on, but shortly afterward, monolithics got a whole
lot better. So the lifetime of the discrete module was fairly short.
But they were very popular for a while.

Opamp Labs still makes stuff that looks like something you'd see in 1970.
http://www.opamplabs.com is amazing.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."