Silas began to laugh. Then to cry. He realized what he had done. He had not built a computer. He had built an elegy . A living fossil record of every broken promise and triumphant hack in the history of electronics. The Alltransistors was the last memory of an age where you could hold a single, discrete component in your fingers and know exactly what it did.

He left it there, singing its quiet, obsolete, essential song. And somewhere, in the dark of the Oregon rainforest, a monument to everything that ever switched from off to on continued to decide, over and over again, that being a transistor was still worth the trouble.

These are the quieter, more sensitive cousins of MOSFETs.

Whether you are a budding electronics engineer or a DIY hobbyist trying to choose the right part for your Arduino project, navigating the transistor family tree can be daunting.