Author Topic: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?  (Read 35393 times)

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Offline JPortici

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #100 on: November 10, 2018, 01:37:47 am »
I was in the south puglia, Alberobello to be exact

Sounds like a great place to spend a summer :) but not to live in :( you know.. "Italia a due velocità"
btw two years ago my cousin moved to gargano to live with his girlfriend.. sometimes he tells me how things are there..

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As far as i know I could not order from RS unless i was a business
as were most distributors until the 2010s AFAIR
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internet was something i got very late on and to this day the village probably still does not have it when it was a decent sized place not far from a town that had it. [...]
yeah, i remember we had a 14.4k line and i have a very clear memory of my dad taking the modem out and smashing it on the ground when the connection was too slow :-DD

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Getting information was very hard,
Without the internet and until i got a prepaid debit card i could not buy anything online and did not know where to get books
we had pretty good libraries (public libraries, school libraries)
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there were magazines but the italian practical electronics was a joke and i was a mug paying money for a magazine that was of no better standard than those so called indutry standard magazines we get at work full of waffle. Oventually practical electronics changed it's name twice becoming a computer magazine with an electrical bent. Circuits in it were often wrong and how i would of etched a board I don't know
i've read magazines from other countries and they were just as terrible and full of mistakes. :(
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and the school lab technician was most unhelpful (an ignorant idiot that did not even know how to etch boards properly).
oh yes, we also had one of those, but most of my teachers were what i would consider gurus (one a guy with two degrees that got the first one a year or two ahead, the typical nerd from the movies, another a guy that worked with military and designed electronics for elicopters, another one -my favourite teacher- one that came from lower schools, but with a great mind and very skilled, he learned everything he needed as he needed it and he was who taught me the most)

why i insist on this? I understand that you had an awful experience, but i can assure that italy is not just that. It can be so much more
 

Offline rhb

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #101 on: November 10, 2018, 01:52:02 am »
The books you learned a topic from are incredibly valuable.  I'm amazed by the notion of textbook rentals, especially in engineering where only a small fraction of the book is covered in class.  I'm sure that 5 years after graduation it is really easy to separate the keepers from the renters.
 

Offline rstofer

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #102 on: November 10, 2018, 02:42:01 am »
I have insisted my grandson buy "new" copies of all textbooks and that he retain them indefinitely.  Since I pay for the books, it's no big deal to him.  The idea, of course, is that he build a library of books he has actually used.

I still have most of my college texts and I actually use them from time to time.

What is more interesting is the changes in presentation over the last 4 decades.  Math books used to be pretty dry with few illustrations.  Today they are filled with diagrams - most in color.  A picture is worth a lot...

One bright note:  His copy of Stewart's "Calculus - Early Transcendentals" appears to be the standard in the industry and will be used for Calc I, Calc II, Linear Algebra and Differential Equations.  It saves a bit of money if the colleges can get together and standardize on a book.  Especially one that can be used for 4 semesters.
 

Offline Simon

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #103 on: November 10, 2018, 08:42:42 am »

oh yes, we also had one of those, but most of my teachers were what i would consider gurus (one a guy with two degrees that got the first one a year or two ahead, the typical nerd from the movies, another a guy that worked with military and designed electronics for elicopters, another one -my favourite teacher- one that came from lower schools, but with a great mind and very skilled, he learned everything he needed as he needed it and he was who taught me the most)

why i insist on this? I understand that you had an awful experience, but i can assure that italy is not just that. It can be so much more

My teachers were happy not to teach once they realised the class were not interested and just gave them all C to get rid of them. At the state exam the third party observer was knowingly whisked off to the bar while I and others gave out the answers to a diff op amp circuit they could not work out from the provided book that contained 2000 pages of gold.

True the UK is nearly as bad in that respect which i now know as I am attempting further qualifications.

I know i was in the worse part of italy but as i originally stated at least for that area it was 10-25 years behind so I have an appreciation of what it may have been like for older people in the UK when they were young.
 

Offline rhb

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #104 on: November 10, 2018, 03:32:50 pm »
I have insisted my grandson buy "new" copies of all textbooks and that he retain them indefinitely.  Since I pay for the books, it's no big deal to him.  The idea, of course, is that he build a library of books he has actually used.

I still have most of my college texts and I actually use them from time to time.

What is more interesting is the changes in presentation over the last 4 decades.  Math books used to be pretty dry with few illustrations.  Today they are filled with diagrams - most in color.  A picture is worth a lot...

One bright note:  His copy of Stewart's "Calculus - Early Transcendentals" appears to be the standard in the industry and will be used for Calc I, Calc II, Linear Algebra and Differential Equations.  It saves a bit of money if the colleges can get together and standardize on a book.  Especially one that can be used for 4 semesters.

Sigh.. once again tl;dr

It's really great to hear that.  I use my college texts a lot, but then that's texts from 12 years of study.  I don't use my undergrad level texts very often,  but  I do from time to time.  And as a lit major lots of those are not references unless you are taking literature and studying writing styles, etc. Or just want to reread it for pleasure.  But except for some that have vanished I have a lot of them.  I've discovered that my Dad borrrowed quite a number, so they reappear from time to time.

Spatial memory if far more important than is widely recognized.  There is a tremendous amount of material that I know is treated on the bottom left side near the middle of a particular book.

My Linear Systems text, "The Fourier Transform and Its Applications" by Bracewell gets used at *least* monthly and generally a lot more than that.  About half of that is for my use and about half when explaining some point in a post.  I have probably 8-10 other books on the Fourier transform, but I know what's in Bracewell, so it's my first choice.  I only go to the others if the matter is not adequately covered in Bracewell.

I have a 5000+ volume technical library.  Seven 12 ft shelves hold the bulk of the computer books and the matching shelves on the back side hold the geoscience and mathematics texts.  I've bought a lot of the classics, like Watson's treatise on the Bessel function which have seen very little use.  Lots of things like that I found at a used book store.  But even then I have well over $150K invested.  But I made quite a lot of money from having that immediately available.  As a literature major I acquired the ability to read with good comprehension at 400-800 wpm.  So if a subject arose at work about which everyone was fairly ignorant, a few days later I was the most knowledgeable by far.  I could beat my way through 1000+ pages of documentation in a day or two.

The development of my library in current form is an interesting tale.  The student bookstore at UT Austin got a trailer load of remaindered textbooks and put them out on a long line of tables made from 4x8 sheets of plywood for sale at $1.  The response was amazing.  The books sold faster than they could bring them out and put them on the tables.  So they got more.  This continued for several months and there was a regular coterie that checked the tables several times a day.  We got to know each other's interests and would often point out new arrivals that might be of interest to them, provided we didn't want it ourselves.  For $1, I'll buy a book on a topic just because I *might, perhaps, maybe* find it useful.  These then got just stacked up in a pile on my living room floor along one wall.  Looking at the titles one day I realized I had acquired a rather good general technical library.  None of these were in any way related to my course work except perhaps as citations and bibliographic entries. This led me to want a general technical library as a personal tool.

After I left Austin I moved to Dallas and for the next 10 years I made the round of 3 Half Price Books locations collecting technical books on every imaginable topic except life sciences.  I did get some of those, but very few.  I need to correct that.  I continued the practice in Houston for 8 more years and if I go to Houston to visit friends I make the rounds while I am there.

The only downside is that a library of that size is a real bear to move.  It takes about 3-4 weeks to pack and about the same to unpack and shelve.  sorting and packing by size is critical to not having the boxes collapse.  The books weigh around 5-6 tons.  It completely fills a 500 sq ft 2 car garage and sits on standard commercial library shelving I bought used from a dealer in California.  It's more work than moving the tools that overflow my 1500 sq ft shop building to the point of being a major obstacle to organizing it.

I'd like to suggest another conditional requirement; that your grandson start a card catalog of some type on electronic media.  I'd love to have an index, but now it would require working full time for a month *if* you could do a book every two minutes continuously for 8 hours every day.

While she was looking for work after joining me in Dallas, my girlfriend spent a full day working on a catalog for me.  Then she turned off the computer without saving the file.  I never had the heart to ask her to do it over.


 

Offline rstofer

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #105 on: November 10, 2018, 04:29:22 pm »

I'd like to suggest another conditional requirement; that your grandson start a card catalog of some type on electronic media.  I'd love to have an index, but now it would require working full time for a month *if* you could do a book every two minutes continuously for 8 hours every day.

While she was looking for work after joining me in Dallas, my girlfriend spent a full day working on a catalog for me.  Then she turned off the computer without saving the file.  I never had the heart to ask her to do it over.

His major, at the moment, is Mechanical Engineering (I tried to get him into CS or EE but no joy!).  So be it!  I have the vast majority of my EE books and my personal library is probably only on the order of 200 books or so - mostly EE and CS.

I buy old books for arcane things like analog computing.  I bought a 100+ year old copy of Bowditch (navigation) just to learn how they used to determine time from a process known as Lunar Distance.  If you have time, an almanac and can see the horizon, you can get a fix on your position.  At one time, I was really into the process of Celestial Navigation.  So was Apollo 13...

Like you, I remember what is where in which volume even if I don't remember the details.

I re-bought a few of Don Lancaster's books just to fill in some gaps in my library.  Seriously, an EE really should have the Active Filters Cookbook and, just for nostalgia, the RTL, TTL and CMOS cookbooks.  No, we're not going to do things that way at this late date but it's always good to kick back and reminisce.  There was a time before FPGAs.  And there certainly was a time before microcomputers and microcontrollers.  And I was there...
 

Offline CatalinaWOW

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #106 on: November 10, 2018, 05:56:07 pm »

I'd like to suggest another conditional requirement; that your grandson start a card catalog of some type on electronic media.  I'd love to have an index, but now it would require working full time for a month *if* you could do a book every two minutes continuously for 8 hours every day.


I can suggest Readerware.  It is not expensive and does a pretty good job as a catalog.  It accepts input from a bar code reader so it is really fast on newer books that have the ISBN bar coded on the back cover or in the front piece.  Even hand keying the ISBN is relatively quick and that catches most books published since the early seventies or so.

My library is not nearly so large as yours, only about 1600 volumes, but it only took a few months of intermittent effort to get it entered.  A dozen or two books whenever I needed a distraction from whatever else was going on.
 

Offline james_s

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #107 on: November 10, 2018, 06:22:05 pm »
I have insisted my grandson buy "new" copies of all textbooks and that he retain them indefinitely.  Since I pay for the books, it's no big deal to him.  The idea, of course, is that he build a library of books he has actually used.

I still have most of my college texts and I actually use them from time to time.

Most of my textbooks were not very good and I got rid of them long ago, the whole textbook thing is a complete racket, new revisions coming out all the time with the same content just shuffled around or altered just enough that you have to buy the new revision. I kept several of my math textbooks for a long time but gave them to the used book store several years ago when I realized I hadn't opened one in years, it's faster for me to look up something online than it is to walk into the other room and grab a dusty book.

I don't know your grandson but I would be shocked if he doesn't get tired of lugging around all those books and dumps the lot after his second or third move. My generation is one of the last to really value physical books and even I have pruned down my collection, keeping only the gems, vintage or unusual stuff and some coffee table books. Any sort of modern textbook material I can find online or in digital copies that don't take up precious space and are easily searched. I now work with a bunch of millennials and they seem to view physical books as quaint relics of their parents and grandparents generation. Everything is online or e-books now, most of them don't own homes and move frequently so they keep minimal physical possessions in order to stay mobile. You see their apartment and there are maybe 2 or 3 books in the whole place, if any at all.
 

Offline GeoffreyF

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #108 on: November 11, 2018, 07:53:53 pm »
Don Lancaster was an informative inspiration to my electronics evolution in the 60's and 70's. I built the TV Typewriter by the way.  However, I think this cartoon is relevant to Guru 'ate.
US Amateur Extra W1GCF.
 
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Offline rhb

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #109 on: November 25, 2018, 12:49:14 am »
 
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Offline Conrad Hoffman

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #110 on: December 05, 2018, 06:10:40 pm »
Some years ago I bought an HP instrument from Don and talked to him on the phone. Great guy. I've used his books over the years and pre-net they were a great source of info. I've worked in various disciplines he's written about over the years and found his writings to be spot on, in spite of what marketing and optimisim would have you believe.

RHB, my library is far smaller than yours, but IMHO a decent technical library is a tremendous technical advantage. Not everything is on the 'net and many things aren't covered in the necessary depth if you'r working in the field. Heck, I still refer to Terman quite often. For practical hands-on how-to-do-it, Joe Carr wrote some very good popular RF books. Especially if you've never wound a toroid. Was never a big Mims fan.

The only thing I can't seem to figure out is if Don is still with us. Anybody know for sure?
 

Offline bd139

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #111 on: December 05, 2018, 06:14:02 pm »
He is. He had an amusing stab I suspect at this thread here: https://www.tinaja.com/whtnu18.shtml#d11.08.18
 

Offline rhb

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #112 on: December 06, 2018, 01:21:16 am »
Don is 78 and apparently  wandering around the desert on archeological projects among other things. I don't think he has slowed down a bit.  He was apparently on a camping trip when this thread started which made me a little concerned.  But then he reappeared with a post about how to tell if camp coffee is strong enough.  If the anvil sinks it's too weak. If it floats it's just right.  If it dissolves it's too strong.  Followed a few days later by the post in reference to this thread.

Out of curiosity I asked and Don was kind enough to offer an estimate of about 1.4 million copies of the TTL Cookbook. So he probably sold over 10 million technical books.  The TTL Cookbook went through at least 3 printings the first year it was out.  John Lenk, Joe Carr and Horowitz and Hill are the only writers in electronics for the popular market that come close.  And AoE is rather upscale by an order of magnitude from Don or Joe.  Which  is a large part of why we had to wait so long for the 3rd edition.

I just had a quick browse through the 33 ft of electronics books which are actually in the correct section of my library.  I have as many or more books by Don than by Lenk and Carr combined.  Microprocessor books are shelved in the computer section, but I can't think of anyone who was as prolific as Don.  With the possible exception of Doug DeMaw.  "Solid State Design for the Radio Amateur" by DeMaw and Hayward is a classic.  For the life of me I don't understand why ARRL let it go out of print.  "Experimental Methods in RF Design" is great, but it really presumes you've mastered the contents of Solid State Design. Doug cranked out a slew of QRP project books aimed at the novice builder who wanted to be able to say he had built a radio from scratch.

I was on the EMRFD list for about a year, but when a post I made showed up 4-5 days later I got angry and unsubscribed.  By the time it appeared it was no longer relevant.   And after posting rather sparsely for such a long period, having to pass approval of a moderator was offensive.  A very large amount of the traffic was people looking for obsolete parts so they could duplicate old designs.  So not even close to the level of this forum.  My all time favorite here is still the "Has anyone built a mass spec" thread.  A few posts in was someone who had built two.  An academic instrument and then a few years later a commercial instrument for which he had a $750K budget.

The OP is too young to grasp that those of us over 50 something consider "guru" a joke.  The younger crowd take it seriously.  With his PostScript skills I half expected Don to whip up a union card, age it a little bit and post a photo.

My library cost me a lot of money.  But I also made a lot of money from having it.  If a topic came up at work that no one was familiar with, odds were pretty good I had references on the topic.  So in a day or two I knew more than anyone else as I could read at 600 wpm and faster if I was skimming massive technical manuals looking for specific information.  Even skimming I would have enough comprehension and retention to have learned quite a lot of contextual information. 

I also never cared for Mims' work.  Those really were just app note circuits redrawn by hand.  But I also had Don's books long before Mims started writing.  Mims  was hanging out with an Air Force buddy, Ed Roberts, designing instrumentation packages for model rocketry when Don published the TTL Cookbook.  And then Ed designed the Altair 8800, Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard and the computer industry was turned upside down.

Mims caused a huge commotion by launching some Estes based rockets in Nam.  I think he was in the Saigon area.  They sent a helicopter gunship to investigate IIRC.  This was when Charlie was  rocketing Saigon on a regular basis using simple X brace to hold a Soviet or Chinese made rocket and a primitive timer to allow them to get away before it took off.
 
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Offline rsjsouza

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #113 on: December 06, 2018, 01:56:16 am »
I didn't know Forest Mims due to the language barrier when I was a kid, but a few years ago my wife got me a NOS copy of his book "Siliconnections" and is, in fact, a great story.
However, if memory does not fail me, Don Lancaster's TTL cookbook was printed in portuguese - I recall the blue cover from a very early age in my life.
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Offline rhb

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #114 on: December 06, 2018, 02:55:54 am »
The foreign language editions made Don's number a guesstimate as they were not too sure how accurate those numbers were.

That was a great book by Mims.  Very lucky guy. He was in the right place at the right time. 
 
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Offline bd139

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #115 on: December 06, 2018, 08:11:24 am »
rhb: some good points on EMRFD and Solid State Design there. I think people missed the point of those books (and the other DeMaw ones) which were to give you a set of problem solving tools and example use cases rather than a set of plans to build something. I am forever seeing scratch builds and copycat rigs everywhere. If anyone comes up with anything even slightly derivative (Farhan/Summers) then they suddenly get treated like the messiah. I think they just read the books properly! I reckon with a suitable choice of standard parts you can come up with your own QRP cult and followers (I have considered this :-DD)

Same problem with a lot of the other books. Most of them weren’t recipe books even if the recipes did work. Lots of projects I’ve seen over the years were bits of familiar stuff glued together poorly in different ways. Sometimes mistakes were copied verbatim!

On a side point I think the basic Mimms books, despite the following, were pretty bad. The circuit scrapbook series weren’t as bad but still suffered from the whole recipe book problem I mentioned above.

Perhaps that’s another cult.

On to Don’s books, I actually learned something with CMOS cookbook. That was a revelation.
« Last Edit: December 06, 2018, 08:12:57 am by bd139 »
 

Offline rsjsouza

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #116 on: December 06, 2018, 01:20:49 pm »
bd139, I think you are missing the point when talking about derivative work: despite anyone can potentially read an advanced book properly, sometimes it takes someone to translate that advanced knowledge into something more palatable, and that is a skill on itself.

I don't know Mimm's books, but I can figure from accounts and his following that he was one of these translators: heck, even when I was a kid I preferred the small electronics magazines with cartoonish drawings and simpler explanations but my father still subscribed to a very good (even for today's standards) more professional magazine. I remember browsing it without too much interest.



« Last Edit: December 06, 2018, 03:50:32 pm by rsjsouza »
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Offline rhb

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #117 on: December 06, 2018, 03:43:10 pm »
DeMaw was trying to get people to build radios rather than just buy them.  Their are 30-40 hams near me, but none of them build anything.

But you have to judge someone's accomplishments in the context of their goals.  Both Farhan and Summers are addressing the cost of radios.  The only station I ever had was an AMECO single 6L6 xtal TX and an RF-2200 portable for the receiver.  The reason was cost.  I was in grad school pursuing my MS and had to earn the money during summers and vacations.  At $139 in 1978, the RF-2200 was a major purchase.

Summers QCX is quite sophisticated.  And his YOTA 2018 design is very attractive.  Farhan's BITX was a significant innovation in cost reduction.  If I were licensed I'd get a uBITX in a heartbeat.

The fundamental problem is the tendency for many people to to want to worship someone.  The most you can do to counteract that is poke fun at yourself as Don does with the "Guru's Lair".  Though after 20 years, you encounter people like the OP who don't get the joke.

I dealt with it on my first contract by saying, "Obviously you have me confused with someone who knows what he is doing" whenever someone asked me a question I couldn't answer.  At one point I counted 8 people in my cubicle per hour which was making doing my work impossible. So after a discussion with my boss we designated another person to screen questions.  He was quite good, so the traffic was reduced to levels that allowed me to actually write code again.

You can only understand things in the context of what you already know.  So I routinely learn something whenever I read an old book I've used many times before.  The "I'll look it up on the internet if I need to know" attitude is producing an entire generation which is completely uneducated despite spending 12-16 years in school.

The most extreme example of mental context controlling understanding is probably the cargo cult in New Guinea.  A C47 had crashed and the natives found all this cool stuff in the wreck.  So they built a replica in hopes of attracting others.  Their mental model for things that flew was birds and they had experience using decoys to attract them.
 

Offline bd139

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #118 on: December 06, 2018, 05:30:33 pm »
Agree on all points
 

Offline floobydust

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #119 on: December 06, 2018, 05:47:23 pm »
There's few people that published large circuit collections, back in the day when paper books and magazines were the media.

I found Forrest Mim's circuits good for a kid or hobbyist starting out into electronics. Not perfect circuits but enough to give you ideas and have fun on the breadboard, at the Radio Shack level.

Don Lancaster's work is very good, relevant even today there are subtleties he brought up nobody discussed. Walt Jung also did a few books full of analog wisdom.
 

Offline rhb

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #120 on: December 06, 2018, 06:29:38 pm »

A snippet of something I just posted to another thread:

The thing that is *really* amazing is that Don's major classics are still in print after over 40 years!  I cannot think of any electronics book that has been in print that long.  Wow!!!!

That's not a guru, that's a Bodhisattva!!!

Even  Jung has been displaced by another author which really surprised me.  But likely due to the churn in op amp chips.  Logic is still logic.
 
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Offline CatalinaWOW

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #121 on: December 06, 2018, 06:50:02 pm »
There are many that have been in print that long, though I agree, I can't think of any that close to the component level that have survived.

Examples of long term survivors.

Fields and Waves in Communications Electronics by Ramo, Whinnery and Van Duzer.  First published in 1965.  Current price is almost 15 times what I paid in the early seventies.

Handbook of Mathematical Functions.  Abramowitz and Stegun.  First published in 1964.  A bit of cheat since it is now a Dover reprint.

Introduction to the Theory of Random Signals and Noise.  Davenport and Root.  First published in 1958.

I know of several others and suspect there are many more.  Things like Feynman's lectures (maybe not exactly electronics), and Donald Knuth's series.


On the theory side, once someone hits a home run it tends to last a long, long time.

 

Offline rsjsouza

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #122 on: December 06, 2018, 07:01:06 pm »
There's few people that published large circuit collections, back in the day when paper books and magazines were the media.
The one I remember we had was Markus' Guidebook of Electronics Circuits - a massive 1000 page compendium of transistor and op amp based circuits. 

The thing that is *really* amazing is that Don's major classics are still in print after over 40 years!  I cannot think of any electronics book that has been in print that long.  Wow!!!!
The other one that I had in the 1980's and it was already in print for a very long time (30 years) was Valkenburg, Nooger and Neville's Basic Electricity and Basic Electronics books.

Fields and Waves in Communications Electronics by Ramo, Whinnery and Van Duzer.  First published in 1965.  Current price is almost 15 times what I paid in the early seventies.
I used this one in my Electromag classes at the university - I paid about 10 times less in the 1990s than what it costs today.
« Last Edit: December 06, 2018, 07:13:58 pm by rsjsouza »
Vbe - vídeo blog eletrônico http://videos.vbeletronico.com

Oh, the "whys" of the datasheets... The information is there not to be an axiomatic truth, but instead each speck of data must be slowly inhaled while carefully performing a deep search inside oneself to find the true metaphysical sense...
 

Offline In Vacuo VeritasTopic starter

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #123 on: December 06, 2018, 07:46:59 pm »

The thing that is *really* amazing is that Don's major classics are still in print after over 40 years!

So is Dianetics...  :-DD
 

Offline bd139

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #124 on: December 06, 2018, 07:52:10 pm »
:-DD I actually read that once. Mein Kampf was less retarded.
 
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