[Chad Hauris]

I can just remember the very end of the tube era in electronics...I started working on radios when I was 8 or 9 yrs old, about 1986 or so and Radio Shack still had their tube tester and some tubes although some like the 50HK6 I needed had to be ordered. You could still pick up a needle for a 1950's RCA at Ratshack.

About that time I correctly diagnosed a bad electrolytic as the cause of hum in a 1950's GE radio; my dad took me to Fox international in Cleveland OH and they said they did not carry that dual electrolytic anymore. I was pretty sad as I thought there was no way to fix it. They did not think to recommend using two single value caps...I didn't figure that out till several years later.

Thank goodness for the World Wide Web...I can remember back before the internet really became widely used and your information resources were pretty much limited by what you could find at the local library and parts were much harder to order for old equipment. I think the actual availability of parts and data for working on tube equipment is actually better now than in the mid '80s.
We just put new 7868 tubes in a jukebox...just a couple of years ago all you had to go on was NOS for those tubes if you could find them.