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I distinctively remember buying my first blue LED in what must have been the mid-90s. I simply walked into an electronic parts store and bought a single spare L
by anyfoo 6y ago
I distinctively remember buying my first blue LED in what must have been the mid-90s. I simply walked into an electronic parts store and bought a single spare LED. I don't think I had ever seen a blue LED in action before, it was completely new to me, so I was very curious.
It was of the very common standard shape and size LEDs were during that time, and its case was colorless but cloudy, not clear. A good thing, because that meant the LED would emit its light along the entire casing, not just straight forward, making it much easier to look at. It also wasn't much brighter than other LEDs, that came later.
When I applied power and saw it shining in that beautiful blue color, I was positively amazed. This was so much cooler and so much more beautiful than the red, green, and yellow LEDs I had been using before. I distinctively remember just leaving it attached to power, sitting on my desk, just for something nice to look at.
- uncledave 6y agoI totally get that. I did exactly the same. Cost £8 at the time if I remember as well which is a hell of a lot of money for an LED. It was just so different to the yellow, red and green ones. I was buying a bit of the future. But roll on to today and the things are mostly a nuisance In my life. I’ve got one shining at me off my monitor now. If I scoot myself up in my chair a bit it doesn’t annoy me as much. I may stick some tape over it. Still, RIP Mr Akasaki. Your contribution to the world is a net good one. Without it we probably wouldn’t have white leds :)
- VBprogrammer 6y agoI remember there was a phase in the late 90s when all of the premium gear had blue LEDs. I remember a Cambridge Audio amp rack and CD player a flat mate had. Now of course they are used on all of the most tacky direct from China stuff.
- nfriedly 6y agoYep, I have one computer with black electrical tape over the blue LEDs, and another where I added a resistor in between the motherboard and the light.
- nerfhammer 6y agoincidentally you can get leds with clear, clouded, or colored+clouded encasings. Only with the latter can you tell what color they are when they're off. One time I had some red leds in clear encasing in a parallel configuration and they inexplicably would not light up... it turned out one of the leds was actually infrared and it was invisibly on and sucking up all of the voltage
- Scoundreller 6y ago> A good thing, because that meant the LED would emit its light along the entire casing, not just straight forward, making it much easier to look at. In a pinch, if you don’t want your 5 or 7mm LEDs to be so focussed: carefully take a set of side-cutters and cut the tip off the LED.
- ashkankiani 6y agoCould probably just use a lower grit sandpaper to rough up the tip.
- taneq 6y agoAt a past job we used LEDs for lighting for machine vision and that's precisely what we did to make them more diffuse.
- Scoundreller 6y agoSave that for lapping CPUs/GPUs and whip out the Dremel.
- jeffwass 6y agoVery similar story here. I was in undergrad back then and worked in a part-time job with the high energy physics dept (we built front-end detector electronics for particle detectors at CERN, Fermilan, SNO, etc). One of the guys on our team had great relations with the major electronics distributors and always had well stocked lab. One day, mid 90’s, we saw he got a sample of few of these brand new Blue LED’s. My coworker and I snuck into his lab after he left and wired one of them up. It’s hard to describe what it was like to see this bright deep blue compared to only the red, yellow, and green LED’s that existed until that point. It was so cool to look at.
- 1_player 6y agoOh man, that takes me back. I used to love looking into my father's spare electronics cabinet when I was a kid, full of chips and resistors and capacitors. I vividly remember the LED drawer, with a hundred red, green, yellow LEDs he used in almost all of his projects, and just one or two of those opaque, white LEDs which I knew shone blue light, and I've never seen him use, as if they were a rare and prized possession. I get it now, as the blue LED technology is so much more recent than any other LED technology. They must have been much more expensive than the other ones.