So it might come as a surprise to learn that some very modest changes to the fabrication techniques now used to build integrated circuits could yet breathe vacuum electronics back to life.Īt the NASA Ames Research Center, we’ve been working for the past few years to develop vacuum-channel transistors. Today even those are gone, and outside of a few niches, vacuum tubes are an extinct technology. By the mid-1970s, the only vacuum tubes you could find in Western electronics were hidden away in certain kinds of specialized equipment-not counting the ubiquitous picture tubes of television sets. The obvious conclusion, previous fears aside, was that even the Soviet Union’s most cutting-edge technology lagged laughably behind the West’s.Īfter all, in the United States vacuum tubes had given way to smaller and less power-hungry solid-state devices two decades earlier, not long after William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain cobbled together the first transistor at Bell Laboratories in 1947. What’s more, they found the plane’s avionics bays to be filled with equipment based on vacuum tubes rather than transistors. fighters, being made mostly of steel rather than titanium. What they discovered astonished them.įor one thing, the airframe was more crudely built than those of contemporary U.S. military analysts, who for the first time had an opportunity to examine up close this high-speed Soviet fighter, which they had thought to be one of the world’s most capable aircraft. His dramatic defection was a boon for U.S. In September 1976, in the midst of the Cold War, Victor Ivanovich Belenko, a disgruntled Soviet pilot, veered off course from a training flight over Siberia in his MiG-25 Foxbat, flew low and fast across the Sea of Japan, and landed the plane at a civilian airport in Hokkaido with just 30 seconds of fuel remaining.
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