Memory Unlocked. We had moved into a house that had an old 60s tube radio built into the wall, it was broken, but my dad went through steps to sort out the issues and pulles a few tubes out. I recall the door with the chart of valve types.
The radio/amp sounded great once fixed. It had these two luninous stripes that you watched as you dialed in a radio station. It was a tuning aid. you tried to get the lines as close as possible to know you had matched a frequency, but if you over dialed the stripes dissapated, and you had to scroll back a bit.

I'm pushing 40 and while I know about vacuum tubes I definitely don't remember seeing these bad boys around

I used to work at a TV repair shop, and the owner owned a lot of these in the surrounding 6 states. In the 80s, he sold them all to a German company for something like 1M, and the German company turned around and resold them for something like 6M 3 months later.

I was in Georgia (the country) a few years back and visited a flea market, where, to my delight, several guys were selling a lot of Russian made tubes. I was inclined to buy a few, but didn't have an opportunity to research the models on the spot, plus the hassle of taking back glass tubes in my luggage was eventually not worth it.

Still, it's endearing to know that they're still around, apart from maker projects and overpriced retro hardware.

I have an old (probably '60s) hifi amp. It's awesome. Replaced the selenium rectifier with silicon, replaced a few caps, and put fresh tubes in it.

It sounds...basically the same as modern solid state stuff to my untrained ear. It's pretty cool that in a sense we "solved" the problem of amplification back then. Most of the speakers of the day were probably complete crap by today's standards (unless you had something upscale like a pair of AR-3s), but a well designed amplifier from the era holds up well.

I remember using these. You didn't have to write down which tubes went where because the store had a sheet of stickers in number pairs, one for the tube, and the matching sticker for the socket.

There are also testers in carry-cases.

And there are companies that sell tube amp kits with very detailed instructions, some based on the Dynaco specs and designs from the 50s-70s. Repro parts are still made. Dynaco sold Dynakits back then.

The tubes are mostly Chinese or Russian made, possibly some in Ukraine.

Thing to remember is they run very high voltages and they can self destruct when one's back is turned.

This vendor has been around for decades and has a supporr forum... http://tubes4hifi.com/

That’s so cool