Sadly some of the 'old friend' through-hole mounting transistors are beginning to disappear or at least be very hard to find.  And those that are still there are rising in price, I guess to reflect the smaller numbers in which they are made.  It's getting almost impossible to find the good old 2N3819 MOSFET I used to use to make oscillators, and even work-horses like the BC107/8/9 transistors are getting ridiculously expensive over here in the UK.

Anybody remember scraping the paint off of the body of an OCR45 to make a photo-transistor?