General > General Technical Chat
Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
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RandallMcRee:
Hmmm,

I was going to stay silent on this one, because, yes, Don is a good guy and everyone was pointing that out. The OP seems to be a bit thickheaded, however, shooting back with a disparagement-by-cooking analogy.

To see some objective evidence of Don's influence you just need to look for PLL circuits. Don was the first, in the CMOS cookbook to fully explain how to make simple PLLs using the CD4046 (a genius chip for its time). I know this because these were also my first interesting, successful circuits back in the day.

Today, if you go to look up more advanced PLL material you will still find numerous references, e.g. in college courses, to Don's original material extracted from his book and put on the web. It is a recipe that has stood the test of time.

I also think that the "Guru" label is a joke, not meant seriously.

cgroen:

--- Quote from: EEVblog on November 06, 2018, 08:23:59 pm ---He wrote half a dozen books or so, designed the pioneering TV typewriter project and helped countless people become entrepreneurs and interested in engineering, and I'm not sure how many magazine tutorial articles, but it's a lot. That's a lot more than most people.
His website is full or article, here is just the tutorial page on PIC's:
https://www.tinaja.com/picup01.shtml
How about 87 Hardware Articles:
https://www.tinaja.com/hhsamp1.shtml
Do you know how much work goes into writing just one good tutorial article, let alone 87 of them?

Was he some leading edge design "guru", no, but does that matter?

--- End quote ---


Ahhh Dave, thanks for bringing the "Typewriter" book into my memories from way back again  :-+
I had forgotten about all the books I have had that Don wrote, make me feel old  :-\
james_s:
I remember reading his articles in magazines back in the 90s, and I still have a copy of TTL Cookbook which has been useful. About 10 years ago I bought some parts on ebay and the seller turned out to be him. I got an email after some time apologizing and saying the parts had been misplaced and sent me a refund. Several weeks after that they showed up in my mailbox, I offered to send the money back but didn't get a reply.

At any rate he was quite knowledgeable in the era, it's easy to forget that pre-internet (which wasn't really very long ago) finding information was SO much harder than it is today. Need a datasheet for a common part? Hopefully you could find a databook in the library or a magazine article to get a photocopy from. What about a more obscure part? Might as well just forget it. To say things have changed would be the understatement of the century.
rrinker:
 Of course I just had to go look up the YouTube video of "One Toke Over the Line" on Lawrence Welk. OMG! The original got frequent airplay and was one of my favorites though I was only about 5 at the time and had no clue at all what a 'toke' was, I just thought they were referring to the train station in my town.

 I do hope all is well with Don. I don;t get the negativity by the OP towards Don's contributions at all. Mims was also an inspiration of mine, first through his column in Popular Electronics and then the Engineer's Notebook series. And there is another series of books he did that were sold through Radio Shack, I have a few of those as well, they predate the Engineer's Notebook ones. Had a lot of fun building some of the transistor circuits in those.  Heck, my senior lab project in college was based on a series on Mims PE articles - we build an LED array oscilloscope. I keep thinkign the Signlent scope I bought a few years ago is the first scope I owned - not really so, I had one a designed and built myself - ok, it was only good to maybe 1KHz and a very small range of vertical amplitude, but you coudl distinguise a square wave from a sine wave from a triangle wave. Most o the time  :-DD
ArthurDent:
Many years ago I built a modification of the WWVB loop antenna/amp designed by Don Lancaster and that antenna is still working on my roof. I found that in the WWVB article, as well as other articles he had written, he explained the theory and trade-offs quite well.

https://www.tinaja.com/glib/rad_elec/experiment_wwvb_8_73.pdf

I'm not sure what the purpose of the OP starting this thread is.  Maybe the old saying: "If you can't say anything positive....."
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