- - Bill - - (exray@coquidotnet) writes:
Scott Dorsey wrote:

You guys are triggering my failing memory. I vaguely remember these
things...something like a black ice-cube with a little wires coming out
of them. Price was something like $1.29-$2.59. I'm struggling to think
of where I saw a magazine article about ho-rigging about three of these
together for something like an AM broadcaster or some such gizmo.
Woulda had to be PE, EI or R-TV-Experimenter in the mid-late 60s since
that was all I had access to.


Everybody and his brother made them. Philbrick, Hewlett-Packard, and
Opamp Labs are some of the ones that are still around today. But
ITI up in Maryland, Solid State Electronics Corporation, Modular Audio
Products. Oh yeah, and Burr-Brown got their start doing this kind of
thing. I think Stephens, the company that later made 2" tape machines,
also started out doing amplifier modules.
--scott


Well, in perspective, it sounds like some sort of cheapo stuff that
never really caught on...like those early TenTec modules.

-bm

Well yes.

There were hybrid modules put out by big companies. For years, I
had an op-amp sitting around that was about 1" on each side, and would
indeed be classified as a module. Even as late as the seventies (and
maybe later for all I know), some companies were producing in such modules.
Remember when touch-tone came to amateur radio? The encoders that many
hams built or used were with such modules, until the function was reduced
to an IC.

But, there were also those cheap modules that were in all the popular
catalogs. I don't think they were marked, or at least minimally marked.
They were simple circuits potted in some sort of compound. Code practice
oscillators, "wireless mics", simple audio amplifiers, metronomes and more
than I can remember. With the addition of a few parts, you'd get the
thing up and running in no time. Thirty to thirty five years ago, they
were all over the hobby electronic magazines (less so the ham magazines),
in the ads and in the construction articles.

Michael VE2BVW