A vacuum tube is an electronic device used for the processing of electrical signals. It consists of two or more electrodes inside a metal or glass tube which has been evacuated, hence the name. In the mid-1800s Sir William Crookes (1832–1919)...

The invention of the vacuum tube (or valve, as it is known in Britain) led to the electronic revolution. Its history begins in 1884. Thomas Edison, while working on his incandescent light bulb, inserted a metal plate between glowing filaments. He...

A vaccum tube is an evacuated electron conducting chamber (tube) designed to eliminate or minimize the influence of atmospheric gas. More commonly, a vacuum tube is an electronic mechanism used primarily to convert alternating current into direct...

In electronics, a vacuum tube, electron tube (inside North America), thermionic valve, or just valve (elsewhere); is a device used to amplify, switch, otherwise modify, or create an electrical signal by controlling the movement of electrons in a...

We're used to computers becoming obsolete almost as soon as they leave the store because of rapid advances in chip technology, but the whole science of silicon chips is starting to show its age.Industry leaders say it must be retired within 10 years and replaced...

The effect is called giant magnetoresistance, but it enables amazing things at the miniature level.Two European scientists won the 2007 Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for their discoveries of the phenomenon, which spurred some of computing's most astonishing developments, from video-playing handheld devices to PCs...

The effect is called giant magnetoresistance, but it enables amazing things at the miniature level. Two European scientists won the 2007 Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for their discoveries of the phenomenon, which spurred some of computing's most astonishing developments, from video-playing handheld devices to...

Sixty years after transistors were invented and nearly five decades since they were first integrated into silicon chips, the tiny on-off switches dubbed the "nerve cells" of the information age are starting to show their age.The devices — whose miniaturization over time set in motion...