I think the OP is trying to prove that holes do exist as there seems to be a perfect vacuum between his ears. He's demanding 40 years later that someone who spent his working career as a successful writer of mass market technical books and magazine articles should also be famous for designing an amplifier topology or any of the other things that Don did not do. As for what he has been doing since then, if you are that successful you do what *you* want to do, not what some snot nosed ignorant punk thinks you should do.
No one has used a Lancaster computer, but there were a lot of Don Lancaster inspired TV typewriters built. And a lot of guys like @duak who took what Don wrote and extrapolated it to do something completely different from what Don presented.
But the OP's real problem is not getting the attention that he craved when he started the thread. It's turned into a bunch of old guys chatting about their personal adventures when they were young. So he's trying to become the center of attention again.
I really wish it were possible to get together and have a few beers with most of this crowd. The neighbor I hung out with while playing with electronics in grad school is long dead. And except for one friend who is an active embedded systems designer, no one I know outside of the internet does anything with electronics at all. I've got one friend who is an unemployed Mines PhD who is trying to teach himself electronics from AoE, but he's still struggling to get a workspace set up. He lives near Houston and their spare bedrooms have been filled with stuff belonging to friends who were flooded by Harvey.
Sadly I know someone who was similar to the OP in high school. And at 60 something he's no different.
"Hi, how are you?"
"I'm doing fine."
OK, that's enough about you, let's talk about me."
After which you get an OCD rant about Stratocaster variants or whatever imaginary fault he sees with the world around him. If allowed, he will tell you the same half hour stories of events from 40 years ago that he told you the last time he talked to you.
It's important to consider that Don was writing at a time when we were all, no matter our age, starved for information about digital logic. As Einstein noted, if you can't explain it to a child you don't understand it yourself. And a very large proportion of the subscribers to Popular Electronics and Radio-Electronics were adolescents and 20 somethings.
The hallmark of a good writer is understanding the target audience and writing to them. Don did a beautiful job of that which is why he was wildly successful.
Most of the devices Don wrote about are now museum pieces. And those of us who avidly studied what he wrote have since gone on to more modern and complex devices. So reading his books today is rather like reading Popular Mechanics from 100 years ago. Most of it is not very interesting, but here and there are the occasional gem. I'm sure Dave's videos will feel the same way 100 years from now. Except in very odd circumstances no one would do things now as they were done 40 years ago.
However, the larger issue is that we have a generation or so that thinks that all they need is "just in time" knowledge. "if I need to know that I'll look it up on the internet." They fail to grasp that knowledge is cumulative. And it is the framework provided by accumulated knowledge that makes further learning possible. You are *not* going to be able to program an FPGA if you don't understand logic design which Don presented in a low cost, hands on manner using the chips of that day. Just as you are not going to understand digital signal processing unless you have first learned calculus and the rudiments of integral transforms and linear systems.
I think @duak's narrative is right on the mark. I didn't have the money to do all that and I graduated high school in '71 when it was *much* harder to get anything. Later in college, I had other priorities like graduating. I finished my first degree in English lit in the fall of '76 just as the rocket took off. It wasn't until I started work on my MS that I was able to play with electronics. And as I was paying for it all, funds were very tight. I was thrilled when I found a Heathkit IO-18 at a yard sale for $75.
An historical aside as it came up earlier, Heathkit was started in 1926 to sell airplane kits. The Heath Parasol.
http://www.museumofflight.org/aircraft/heath-parasol
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