Quote:
Originally Posted by init4fun
And lets not forget the great "tube count scandal" of the late 20s/Early 30s where some manufacturers , knowing the buying public equated tube count to the radio's performance , took to falsely inflating the "tube" count by using multiple , unneeded , "Ballast Tubes" (glorified lightbulbs that looked like tubes but were far cheaper to produce) . These "Tubes" were nothing more than resistors , but resistor count wasn't sellin radios , TUBE count was , So what if half of the "tubes" actually wern't active elements in the reception or amplification of the sound ? "Hell , It's got 12 tubes !!! It's GOTTA sound better than that 6 tube radio , right ?" . Lawsuits were brought , companies ruined , and it was just business as usual for the poor buyers who saw no refunds on the prices they had paid for these phony "High Performance" sets .
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Same thing happened with transistor radios in the 60's. Radios bragged how many transistors they used. I have a "16 transistor " set that had pairs of transistors wired in parallel, base to base, emitter to emitter, and collector to collector. But only the transistor with a lower B-E voltage drop will do any work.
And about 15 years ago computers were sold on how many MHz the CPU operated at...