Articles History of Electronics

Navigating the burgeoning cities of the early twentieth century would have been a very different experience without the electromechanical railway and elevator systems designed by Frank Sprague. The basic layout of a modern metropolis a core of ...

The high-efficiency switching power supply has become a staple ingredient in many of today’s electronic systems. What is its origins and how has it evolved over the decades? Switched-mode power supplies are found in electronics all around us. ...

75 years ago, one of the biggest electronics firms of the century got its start in a Palo Alto, California, garage and it did so with the help of Mickey Mouse. In the 1930s and 40s, David Packard and fellow Stanford University graduate William ...

Last October, after seven months of silence due to a major upgrade of the 70 m wide radio antenna located in Canberra, NASA sent a set of commands to a 43 year-old spacecraft, Voyager 2. Billions of miles from earth since its launch in 1977, ...

Thomas Weiss, Nexperia In 1969 the first device housed in the breakthrough SOT23 plastic surface mount package rolled off the assembly line. Last year Nexperia alone shipped over 30 billion SOT23 packaged devices. These two facts highlight a key ...

Jessica MacNeil EDN On this day in tech history, Echo 1A, NASA's first successful communications satellite, was launched from Cape Canaveral. The launch followed on a similar but unsuccessful attempt by NASA in May 1960 to launch a near ...

George Leopold EE Times The Soviets had bigger boosters that could loft larger payloads, but the American emphasis on weight reduction and its emerging electronics sector proved decisive in reaching the moon by the end of the 1960s. The relatively ...

Jon Peddie Electronic Design There's a long history of graphics processors and controllers that have changed the course of the computer graphics market. Major players in the emerging graphics chip market, including IBM, Intel and Texas ...

I began my career in electronic circuit design in 1972; I remember what relatively few integrated circuits were available at that time. So, when I look back at the Apollo program that began in the early '60s and put a man on the Moon in 1969, I ...

Suzanne Deffree EDN The company now known as AT T first established commercial telephone service between North America and Europe on January 7, 1927. Using radio, the American Telephone and Telegraph Co hosted a two-way conversation between New ...