MIKE ROSS wrote in a message to Roy J. Tellason:

 MR> "Roy J. Tellason" bravely wrote to "all" (31
Oct 03  04:05:37)  ---
 MR> on the heady topic of "weird little oscillator circuit" 

 RJT> I ran across this,  thought that some of you might find this
 RJT> entertaining...

 RJT> It apparently _is_ a multivibrator,  though with only two resistors
 RJT> and two caps,  a few less parts than the usual astable circuit...

 MR> I've seen something similar but this is indeed elegant. The least
 MR> parts oscillator I've ever seen consists of a speaker with a stiff
 MR> wire soldered so that it touches the cone connection. When the cone
 MR> moves forward the connection is broken and the cone returns.

That's not a speaker,  that's a buzzer!  (We have one here in this
apartment, FWIW...)

 MR> Of course you have to get the right battery polarity to get the 
 MR> cone to move forward.

Not if you remove the magnet.  :-)

 MR> A close 2nd is a tunnel diode with a resistor and capacitor.

Those always struck me as kinda nifty,  but they never seemed to catch on
all that well.  I don't know why that should be.

You also don't see much these days about any of the thyristors,  SCRs, 
SCSs, Triacs, Diacs, SBSs,  UJTs, PUTs,  etc.  I guess SCRs and Triacs see
some common usage,  but the rest of that stuff?

I knew that you could rig some of these parts from a pair of transistors, 
but couldn't recall the exact configuration,  till I saw somebody mention a
site and found it there.  (Incidentally the same site where that circuit
came from.)  Though I don't have any inclination to go out and buy parts
for some of the nifty simple little circuits you can do with those sorts of
parts I can see where they'd be easy using a pair of transistors.  The only
ones that get complicated are the ones like SBS, Triac, etc. where they
need to handle AC,  and I don't need to do that for the most part.  So
maybe I'll end up playing around with some of this stuff.

Oh yeah,  there's also the "4-layer Diode",  which I haven't
heard anything about in ages.  Sorta acted like a lower-voltage neon bulb, 
if I'm remebering right.  Made it fairly easy to make a relaxation
oscillator...

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