I've personally never seen any other transistors using exactly the same case, but there are a few as per this datasheet. I looked them up further and bingo - they were definitely the 2N2926. I also had a multimeter - a basic analog unit - and I was able to identify the transistors as NPN types.Ībout a year after I got the first boards, I chanced to read in Practical Electronics about a transistor whose Hfe value range was identified by a dot of paint on the top. These were, as I said above, in a very strange case, which had a dimple on the top with a dot of paint - brown, red, orange, yellow, or green. Similarly, only a limited number of transistor types were to be found. The other problem with these boards was that, being logic circuits, there were only a limited number of resistor values used. This resulted in misshapen, short-leaded components, but it meant one more thing I did not have to spend my precious pocket money on. I then had to do the same with the other end of the resistor, or the other wires in the case of the transistors. This meant that in order to get the components off the board, I had to heat up the joint, bend the wire back to the vertical position, and then extract it from the board. Now, when they had been assembled, the boards my dad brought to me had all the wires bent over onto the copper side of the board. My dad had also bought me a soldering gun (yes, a gun, not an iron) much like the one shown below, except that mine was not a Weller, but it was very similar in appearance. The resistors were carbon five percent 1/2 watt types, while the transistors were of a cryptically-marked type with a very strange case. And so it was that I acquired a growing pile of old Burroughs boards, which were populated mainly with resistors and transistors (there were no integrated circuits in those days). He bought me Practical Electronics magazine every month, and also sweet-talked the technicians at Burroughs into giving me their old PCBs, along with anything else electronic or electrical off old accounting machines from which I might obtain something useful. In, fact he was not much of a DIYer in any respect, but he did encourage my growing obsession with electronics as best he could. My dad was not technically-minded at all. My dad was sales manager for the local branch of Burroughs Machines (of accounting machine and - later - computer fame) in Harare, Zimbabwe, which was then known as Salisbury, Rhodesia. I first became interested in electronics when I was around 12 or 13 years old. Based on the enthusiastic number of comments, our esteemed editor - Max Maxfield - thought it might be of interest for me to write something at the opposite end of the spectrum - stripping old printed circuit boards (PCBs) for parts. I have previously written on the joys and tribulations associated with creating one's own PCBs.
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