Tube Electronics

MIT IAP 2026

Welcome to the homepage for the 2026 IAP offering of 6.S917, "Tube and Early Transistor Circuits."

Syllabus/info is here. Office Hours Calendar is below and all the course material will appear below as needed. Note the lab space (38-601) is open 9am-5pm M-F in IAP and the components/equipment for labs are up there and available at any time for you. I'm just adding office hours

Calendar

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Week 1

• Lecture 1: Background
  • Sweet trois minute video of pre-electric telegraph system in France
  • Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept by Leo Marx
• Lab 1: Electromechanical Amplifiers
  • Claude Shannon's 1937 thesis linking logic to relays
  • Konrad Zuse's Early Computers
• Lecture 2: Detectors and Nonlinearity
  • Early Radio Wave Detectors (V.J. Phillips)
  • From Branly Coherer to Chua Memristor (Chap 1 from Fractional Dynamics, Anomalous Transport, and Plasma Science)
  • Electrical conductivity in granular media and Branly's Coherer: A Simple Experiment
  • "The Italian Navy Coherer Scandal Revisited" by Probir K. Bondyopadhyay
  • "The Dynammo and the Virgin" Chapter from Henry Adams' The Education of Henry Adams
  • The Future Eve by Auguste Villiers de'Isle-Adam (in French Sorry, English translation somehow not out of copyright...just view it in Chrome and use Google to translate the page, though.)
  • Edison's Conquest of Mars by Garrett P. Serviss
  • The Saga of the Vacuum Tube (chapters 1-2) by Gerald F.J. Tyne
  • Type 879 Mazda Diode
• Lab 2: Germanium FM Detector

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