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Historical
Background
IBM established an aggressive
transistor development program in the early 1950s and continued with a
substantial engineering and production effort throughout the decade. By
the mid 1960s, IBM had exited the transistor manufacturing business, and
relied on key suppliers such as Motorola and Texas Instruments. During the
decade from approximately 1952 to 1962, IBM developed and manufactured a
variety of germanium transistor types for use in their commercial
computers. Primary types of
computer transistors produced by IBM during this timeframe included alloy
junction and graded base/drift, and both NPN and PNP configurations were
made.
Your Transistor Museum™ IBM germanium transistor is from
an experimental 1959 lot of alloy junction transistors produced to evaluate
new production and test equipment. These are PNP alloy junction types and
have similar characteristics to IBM types 25 and 33, which are general purpose
PNP alloy junction transistors. IBM germanium transistors represent a
unique and important milestone in computer and transistor history, and you
can use your historic 50 year old transistor for display purposes or in actual
circuitry to demonstrate a general purpose PNP germanium transistor.
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