General > General Technical Chat

Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?

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westfw:
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!

T3sl4co1l:
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

rhb:

--- Quote from: T3sl4co1l 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.

[snip]

Tim

--- End quote ---

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

coppice:

--- Quote from: rhb on December 30, 2020, 01:37:22 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."

--- End quote ---
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.

lrak:
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.   

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