g1smd - 10:39 pm on Nov 21, 2012 (gmt 0)

The US military laughed when a captured Russian military plane was examined in the 1980s. It was stuffed full of valve-based circuitry - not a transistor in sight. Only later did they realise that all the US planes would fall out of the sky when the electro-magnetic pulse from a nuclear blast fried all their circuits, while the Russian plane using valves would not be affected.