Ge Transistors for old times sake and Fuzz Face origin (maybe)

[Rob Strand]

I found this little historical dump of germanium transistor info from the olden days:

http://ibm-1401.info/VintageGermaniumComputerTransistorsDavid%20Laws.pdf

In there I noticed a reference to the "Ge Transistor manual".   For those who don't know this book was probably *the* most popular reference book for transistors from the time transistors started to at least the mid 80's.   It contained a large number of standard circuits using transistors.  It was pretty much the recipe book for transistor circuits.  It rapidly grew in size each year from Edition 1 (1957) at around 100 pages, to Edition 7 (1964) to around 330 pages.

... yada, yada, yada ...

The most popular edition was perhaps edition 7 (1964).  In there it shows the basic template for the fuzz-face as "Direct Coupled Amplifier" (p102).   Perhaps this was the inspiration for the fuzz-face.   (The basic idea actually appears in earlier versions of the Ge Transistor manual, and probably goes back further to tube amplifier designs.)

[aron]

Very cool! Thanks!