Yeah, I do. Cheerful glowing vacuum toobs. Voltages that will let you know where your hands are, and who is boss. Them were the good old days.
Have to wonder about the $300 transistor version. I played with transistors in the 50's and they could be had for ~$5 each, so maybe that is corrected for inflation. Then I did work with potted RCA modules for things like flip flops and RTL gates and monostables in the Navy - small, color coded, plastic rectangular boxes, filled with epoxy and wire leads for PCB mounting. The whole circuit board was $300 and would have 3-5 modules on it. We started building our own replacements when RCA couldn't supply parts in time.
I was perusing Nelson Pass' site and he gives a few updated schematics for do it yourself solid state op amps. The idea being that you can build a "better" op amp that isn't integrated. I think the purpose was to increase the slew rate for HiFi audio applications.
