> What progress there has been made in the basic components we use every day?
I remember working with 20% carbon-composition. Even if you paid more for 10%, and even though resistors were the most reliable parts in electronics, they failed a lot. Often by drifting to the wrong value: the circuit "worked", but badly, and volt-readings did not make sense.
Carbon-film is a significant improvement over carbon-composition. If nothing else: they look burned when they have overheated. But they also come 5% standard and 1% doesn't really cost more except the distributor has to keep many more values in stock. (There is a reason I mostly design with 10, 22, and 47-value resistors: anything else was rare.) (FWIW, the cost of one resistor has not changed in decades, but the cost in quantity is much lower now.)
Recent Japanese $1 electrolytic caps are better than the $20 Computer Grade caps I used to buy. (In fact at the time, the $1 caps were better, but it has taken 20 years to prove it.) I don't care about low inductance: if your application is that sensitive to inductance, where do you put a wire? I did once have to defend an electro's impedance, and I proved it was insignificant compared to the driver over the audio range and beyond (and far less than the 100 foot cable it fed). Leakage is vanishingly low and stable over decades, no "dry-out".
I don't think Orange Drop film caps have ever been beat, unless you find your music in magic cap-oils. However the P-sonic film caps seem to work just as well as Orange Drops, with ample safety margin (I was working some 250V parts at 400V for fun).
From what my father says: 1930s parts were even worse, and a few-year old radio could need ALL its caps (electro and wax) and several resistors replaced.
I remember when you could find an extra-noisy 2N2219/2N2222. You just don't find noisy transistors now. (But you also can't find a true 2N2219 in a metal pot.)
I remember when a CK322 cost as much as two tanks of gasoline, and when a 2N2222 cost as much as 4 gallons of fuel. When was the last time you had to choose between gas-money and transistor budget? And some of the single opamps in microscopic packages are selling as cheap as transistors.
