Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kamagmar 5283 days ago
According to this:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/big-shift-for-gas-guz...

we exported $37.1B worth of vacuum tubes last year. I could be wrong but that amount seems wildly implausible. Could the category actually be "Vacuum tubes, etc." where "etc" is semiconductors?

2 comments

The only things I really know of that would still use vacuum tubes are esoteric high-end audiophile amplifiers, and some "old school" guitar amps (Marshall, Hiwatt, etc). Is there really that big a market? Are they used for anything else?
You are overlooking things like magnetrons, x-ray tubes, photomultipliers, CRTs (which still have a lot of applications outside of the video display sphere), krytons and so forth. It's not all about diodes, triodes, tetrodes and pentodes.
Wikipedia lists some other modern uses including (most unexpectedly) in particle accelerators:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_tube#Vacuum_tubes_in_the...

I believe NORAD computers still use vacuum tubes.
One of my professors told me a few years ago that tubes were still used heavily in high-power commercial radio stations. Could be dated info though.
My money is on someone getting "facts" off Wikipedia or similar without doing any smell testing on the numbers.