is it possible to buy individual transistors that are in a vacuum tube form factor
Follow
context: i was watching the latest veritasium video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FU_YFpfDqqA) and someone in it said something to the effect of "the advantage of having a processor that's a meter tall is that you can point to individual parts of the processor"
so my thought is, you could make a board that Looks Like a vacuum tube computer, for demonstration purposes, but which doesn't actually rely on power-hungry and failure-prone vacuum tube triodes to function
@typhlosion: You could just place the individual transistors a bit apart, and perhaps even place nice LEDs next to them to show their states.
A catch, though: the best-known family of classic transistor-based logic, TTL, relies on multi-emitter or multi-collector transistors. These are really easy to make if you're designing a silicon chip yourself, but they have little use as discrete components, and availability may be quite an issue. As a result, homebrew CPUs tend to go for either MOSFET logic, which can be more cumbersome to work with because discrete MOSFETs are rather static-sensitive, and/or build on things such as quad NAND gate chips rather than entirely discrete parts.