Author Topic: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?  (Read 35379 times)

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Online Zero999

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #175 on: December 16, 2020, 03:13:44 pm »
did you post that in the right thread?
Yes, I replied to the this post in the current thread. I admit it's off-topic, but if you don't want people replying, then why not remove it?

Anyway, as far as the orignal topic is concerned. Who is Don Lancaster? I've never heard of him. Going from what I've Googled, he isn't some kind of electronics genius, but someone who's very good at explaining things, from a non-technical point of view. The title is also wrong, by using the word was, which implies he's dead, when as far as I'm aware, he's still alive and well.

The original post is controversial. Someone posting their strong opinion about an author's articles being "content-free, typo-filled, hyperbolic, self-aggrandizing prattle" will result in an arguement, as many people will disagree with it. I'm not surprised the orignial poster was banned.
« Last Edit: December 16, 2020, 05:14:51 pm by Zero999 »
 

Offline edavid

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #176 on: December 16, 2020, 03:51:10 pm »
Yes he was. Back then the 7400 series of ICs had come out and they seemed a bear to use. What Don did in his TTL cookbook was to distill out the essential design prindiples that were needed to successfully use TTL ICs.

You must have read a different book than I did.  The TTL Cookbook I know has some trick circuits that you should never use, but just about nothing about how to design a system.

Quote
Back then getting datasheets was not easy. No internet back then.

That's not what I remember at all.  It was pretty easy to call the local TI sales office and get a TTL Databook (or a whole box of databooks), even if you were a student.  That was free, unlike Don's books and electronics magazines.
 

Online coppice

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #177 on: December 16, 2020, 04:11:08 pm »
It was pretty easy to call the local TI sales office and get a TTL Databook (or a whole box of databooks), even if you were a student.  That was free, unlike Don's books and electronics magazines.
As well as the databooks full of data sheets, there were lots of applications books available from the silicon vendors. These ranged from basic information about using TTL ICs, to things like the AMD books on how to use their 2500 and 2900 family parts to efficiently build ALU and DSP architectures (the great works of Mick and Brick :) ). Whatever you were looking for, for serious engineering, the silicon vendors had a better alternative to people like Don Lancaster. His forte was explaining things in simple terms to beginners.
 

Offline CatalinaWOW

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #178 on: December 16, 2020, 04:53:33 pm »
The two previous posts correctly describe why Lancaster was not the best resource for engineers.  Different story for hobby folk, and unfortunately for a fairly large number of professionals.

Also, while sales reps for the various companies were pretty generous with handing out their stuff, they weren't easy to locate for everyone.  Yellow pages worked if you were in the Silicon Valley, but where Don is holed up and thousands of similar places finding who to ask was a journey of its own.
 

Offline james_s

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #179 on: December 16, 2020, 05:36:25 pm »
Anyway, as far as the orignal topic is concerned. Who is Don Lancaster? I've never heard of him. Going from what I've Googled, he isn't some kind of electronics genius, but someone who's very good at explaining things, from a non-technical point of view. The title is also wrong, by using the word was, which implies he's dead, when as far as I'm aware, he's still alive and well.

The original post is controversial. Someone posting their strong opinion about an author's articles being "content-free, typo-filled, hyperbolic, self-aggrandizing prattle" will result in an arguement, as many people will disagree with it. I'm not surprised the orignial poster was banned.

He was a prolific author contributing to American hobby electronics and personal computer magazines throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s, as well as a number of books. If you were into electronics and lived in the USA during that period it was almost impossible to be unfamiliar with him. In the rest of the world all bets are off, I don't know if Radio Electronics, Popular Electronics and others were widely distributed elsewhere.

IMHO it's unfair to judge his content through the lens of today, I feel old saying this but it was a different world back then. Yes, professional engineers and engineering students had access to datasheets and whatnot but that was never Don's audience. His target was hobbyists, the people who today would typically be called "makers" or whatever. People who tinkered in their garage and repurposed salvaged and surplus gear, you couldn't just hop online and buy cheap gadgets from China back then, or search online and find thousands of hobby projects to build. Your choices at the time were pretty much limited to magazines, books and clubs. I really don't think someone who wasn't around during the pre-internet era could even relate to how different everything was. It's like comparing before and after the industrial revolution.
« Last Edit: December 16, 2020, 05:39:22 pm by james_s »
 
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Online jfiresto

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #180 on: December 16, 2020, 06:08:33 pm »
... Yes, professional engineers and engineering students had access to datasheets and whatnot but that was never Don's audience. His target was hobbyists, the people who today would typically be called "makers" or whatever....

Don's audience was much broader than that. From the preface of the CMOS Cookbook, second edition:



The first edition states pretty much the same.
-John
 

Offline james_s

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #181 on: December 16, 2020, 06:15:45 pm »
Well something else to remember is that CMOS ICs were brand new, so there were a lot of engineers who got their education in the 1950s and were accustomed to working with vacuum tubes and later discrete transistors. I could see there being quite a few seasoned engineers who'd had no exposure to this entirely new class of components.

Either way his largest audience was hobbyists of one level or another.
 

Online jfiresto

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #182 on: December 16, 2020, 06:45:44 pm »
Well something else to remember is that CMOS ICs were brand new, so there were a lot of engineers who got their education in the 1950s and were accustomed to working with vacuum tubes and later discrete transistors. I could see there being quite a few seasoned engineers who'd had no exposure to this entirely new class of components.

Either way his largest audience was hobbyists of one level or another.

That's as may be, but that does not diminish Don's broader audience. I do not have to remember: I bought the CMOS Cookbook when it first came out.
-John
 

Offline schmitt trigger

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #183 on: December 16, 2020, 07:28:55 pm »
Don Lancaster, Forrest Mims, Walt Jung, Doug Self and many others wrote books and articles which bridged the enormous gap between full academic textbooks and elementary hobby-grade publications.

For that I am grateful.
 
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Offline Alex Eisenhut

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #184 on: December 17, 2020, 06:39:06 am »
Come to think of it, it's his fault I have a Tektronix 547.
Hoarder of 8-bit Commodore relics and 1960s Tektronix 500-series stuff. Unconventional interior decorator.
 
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Offline westfw

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #185 on: December 24, 2020, 11:57:38 am »
Sigh.  A couple of things...
  • the OP reads too much, and too "modern" a usage, into the term "guru."  Before it had a "top expert" vibe, "guru" had more of a "teacher of arcane knowledge" connotation to it.  Lancaster certainly fell (falls!) into that category.
  • I've got very dog-eared copies of 1st Edition TTL, CMOS, and TVT Cookbooks.  I built a computer terminal, back in the late 70s.  The video part was actually Z8-based and bought, but it needed an ASCII keyboard, which I built using basically the circuit (and some of the tricks) from CMOS cookbook.
  • The "prestigious Ivy League University" I attended had a class that used CMOS Cookbook and TTL Cookbook as textbooks for one of its classes.  Not EE; as other have pointed out, these were "cookbooks" and not "rigorous engineering."  Just the thing for "wait - how do I build a divide-by-three circuit out of flipflops that fundamentally divide by two?"  The class was a Graduate level Chemistry class about building lab equipment!
  • He was clearly an early proponent of what we now call "Open Source", long before it was called that.  And still is.  Most of his books are downloadable for free from his site.
  • I think he had two blind spots.  First, he seems to have been a big believer in "a bit of extra technical knowledge can make you a successful business", without realizing how much marketing and sales and business knowledge would also be needed (I dunno.  I haven't actually read "Incredible Secret Money Machine."  But I remember him being very "buy a postscript printer, learn postscript, and do desktop publishing for profit!")
  • The second (and related) was the failure to internalize just how fast Moore's Law was going to change things.  "Micro Cookbook" (1982.  At least partially online as "Machine Language X") has this quote in its preface: "Why machine language? Because, as it turns out, virtually all win­ning and top performing microcomputer programs run only in machine language. The marketplace has spoken. It has not only spoken but is shouting: BASIC and PASCAL need not apply!"  (isn't that quaint!  Mind you, that was probably written before the IBM PC debut, and was mostly about the Apple ][.   But Turbo Pascal and "good" C compilers on 16bit machines were only a couple of years away.  And I don't think he every caught up.
  • I like postscript.  Yeah, it does neat things.   I think I've got first edition postscript books as well, and I've written raw seething postscript.  From a desktop-publishing point of view, though, your $7000 laserWriter didn't really stay ahead of $3000 LaserJets with more primitive printer SW, and "adequate" document-prep software.  (And it was probably the Apple Mac that did away with a lot of the need for postscript knowledge.)  (See (6))
Anyway, the MAIN thing I wanted to say is that much of Lancaster's writing is online and downloadable for free.  From his own website...https://www.tinaja.com/ebksamp1.shtml
They cover a lot of things that are just not taught any more - Machine Language, basic logic circuits, how a UART or a keyboard works.   There are good reasons that this stuff is harder to find now - you can just throw a microcontroller at most of those, without needing to understand many of the nitty-gritty details.   But they're worth downloading and skimming!
 
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Offline T3sl4co1l

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #186 on: December 24, 2020, 02:27:27 pm »
Also, his fascination with magic sinewaves.  I don't know that he ever had a concrete application in mind.  I don't recall any circuits to generate timing.  Presumably just counters and gates -- or an MCU and timer -- which, quantization completely wrecks the timing required to null all those harmonics.

As it turns out, people do use those techniques today; they're somewhat more mundane (and perform not nearly so much better than plain old PWM or S-D, to displace either one), and way, way more computationally intensive than perhaps he ever envisioned.  Yup, upside to all the CPU power we have these days: you can solve the trig polynomials in real time, say every few cycles* or so, making actual dynamic control possible -- the pulses and timings are all completely dependent on output waveform and amplitude, so it's a rather useless thing to try and precalculate a couple of operating points, when what you really want is something you can vary continuously (and perhaps not always have the best results, but to have it clean most of the time greatly saves on harmonic energy and therefore filtering and EMI).

*Cycles of whatever waveform you're synthesizing, that is.  Not like, CPU or timer clock cycles...

Also an aversion to solar power, at least back in the 90s and 00s.  Specifically that it would never be a net energy producer, but here we are, looking it up I see a 2012 powerpoint showing the industry either on track for, or achieving, break-even (more power produced than consumed), and another 2018 article showing we've also cleared total production (net energy producer including development and capital costs), and also that wind has an unusually quick payback time (less than a year!). :-+  I haven't read tinaja.com recently enough to know if that position has been updated, I assume it has.

Just some peculiar contours to a smart and complex individual. :-+

Tim
Seven Transistor Labs, LLC
Electronic design, from concept to prototype.
Bringing a project to life?  Send me a message!
 

Online rhb

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #187 on: December 30, 2020, 01:37:22 am »
Also, his fascination with magic sinewaves.  I don't know that he ever had a concrete application in mind.  I don't recall any circuits to generate timing.  Presumably just counters and gates -- or an MCU and timer -- which, quantization completely wrecks the timing required to null all those harmonics.

[snip]

Tim

I'd like to suggest you read the paper Joseph Fourier presented in 1810-1812.  It led Gauss to remark, "If that's true you can synthesize any arbitrary function."

All Don was doing was attempting to describe the Fourier transform to people who didn't understand  it in school or never encountered it,

Don Lancaster is a consummate  technical  writer.  I know of no one better and I own and have read a  lot of books and took a course in techncial writing along the way. . Very few  people, Bob Pease, Jim Williams, Walt Jung and a handful of others were in the same class.

It's easy to go,  "Meahh", 40+ years later, but Don told me the "TTL Cookbook" sold around 1.2 million copies.  If that's not success I don't know what is.

Don understands it.  He chose to make a living explaining it.  And happily did  very well.

Did not predict advances in the abysmal solar of the day? Give me a break!

Have Fun!
Reg
 

Online coppice

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #188 on: December 30, 2020, 04:23:23 am »
I'd like to suggest you read the paper Joseph Fourier presented in 1810-1812.  It led Gauss to remark, "If that's true you can synthesize any arbitrary function."
It also allowed Gauss to work out an FFT algorithm and then promptly bury the information so it only came to light well after Cooley and Tukey had published their paper on a similar form of FFT algorithm.
 

Offline lrak

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #189 on: August 13, 2022, 07:03:23 pm »
Lancaster's books were read by anyone doing design work in the 1980s-2000 - he had a knack for making complicated topics understandable..

Even today, his active filter book would be mandatory if you are going to design an analog filter.  His TTL and CMOS cookbooks are still a great way to learn about discreet logic.

I'm an old fart - never met any competent EE's that didn't know of Lancaster.   
 

Online rhb

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #190 on: September 15, 2022, 05:32:55 pm »
I'd like to suggest you read the paper Joseph Fourier presented in 1810-1812.  It led Gauss to remark, "If that's true you can synthesize any arbitrary function."
It also allowed Gauss to work out an FFT algorithm and then promptly bury the information so it only came to light well after Cooley and Tukey had published their paper on a similar form of FFT algorithm.


I had the pleasure of meeting an old geophysicist who “invented” the FFT before Cooley & Turkey.  It’s just a reordering of addition and multiplication after scaling to the interval minus Pi to Pi.  There is now a record in the literature on some of the people who did this.  They were better mathematicians than most and simply thought the idea was obvious to anyone who did their calculations with a desk calculator.
 

Offline jonpaul

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #191 on: September 15, 2022, 05:39:24 pm »
Don and his wife are fine folks, retired but still active.

His "cookbooks" were very good introductions to many electronic topics.

He can be considered a guru as he was pioneer in several fields and popularized knowledge with his handbooks,

Jon
An Internet Dinosaur...
 
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