General > General Technical Chat
Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
rhb:
--- Quote from: In Vacuo Veritas on November 06, 2018, 08:01:15 pm ---So I found these articles by some guy that apparently was quite popular years ago in the electronics world: Don Lancaster.
However I have found most of his columns in magazines to be content-free, typo-filled, hyperbolic, self-aggrandizing prattle. A self-appointed "guru"? Really? ::)
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Seems a pretty good description of you, except you haven't written anything other than some offensive forum posts.
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Everything was either utterly simple or completely change the world forever, yet I can't find anything he's actually done. A few publications for circuits in the 1970s and a book or two of basically republished data books and he's been coasting on that for decades?
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You obviously did not look very hard if you only found one or two books. None of which are republished data books. Don certainly did include the important part of the datasheets for the devices referenced in the books. Otherwise they would have not been usable by many of his readers. Data books were *very* hard to get if you didn't work for a large company. And people who did get them for free had a long list of people who wanted their old copy. I still have the hand me down data books I was given. Many of the devices are no lonAnd "book on demand" has changed the publishing world as did PostScript.
--- Quote ---And what's his obsession with PostScript?
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In the day when a small microcontroller cost several hundred dollars, Don was showing how you could use your LaserWriter to do the job. Ever hear of a "parallel port"? That was how you normally drove a printer and the parallel port on the LaserWriter was bidirectional. So the range of things you could do with it was limited only by the number of pins (not problem for Don to expand with a bit of TTL or CMOS logic) and your ability to fit everything into memory.
And if you wrote raw PostScript you could print anything you wanted to using an ordinary text editor. So I printed business cards with a small PostScript file that were of professional quality and cut them with a paper knife. Even today I sometimes use raw PostScript for the simple reason it is far less work than any other option. And it doesn't cost anything extra. Apple wanted you to dump your Apple II and buy a MacIntosh. So Don showed that you could do everything with an Apple II.
But more importantly, PostScript provided a *device independent* means of printing complex pages. That was *not* possible before PostScript was developed. If you ever had to write a printer driver or even configure a printer for which you had a driver in the 70's and early 80's you might be able to understand.
If you told a professional chef that his plate layout was not very good or he got the recipe wrong you got precisely the answer you deserved. At least, short of picking you up by the scruff of the neck and throwing you out the door.
Aside from the general attitude, your biggest problem is you are ignorant and lazy. As was amply demonstrated by your first post. If you were not ignorant you would have understood about PostScript. And if you weren't lazy you would have learned very quickly that Don was a very prolific writer.
However, your biggest problem is you crave attention so much you seek it even if it results in people taking a very negative view of you.
But, no worries, mate. You'll be gone soon, though perhaps not soon enough to suit some of us.
Edit: I just checked Don's website and he is clearly alive and active at least as of yesterday so the "godman" of our youth is still with us.
Just for fun, here's the text of his 2 November post which for some reason did not appear when I checked his website yesterday.
The "anvil test" for camp coffee...
If the anvil sinks, it it too weak.
If the anvil floats, it is just right.
If the anvil dissolves, it is too strong.
Which I think says a lot about the "Guru's Lair" name.
vk6zgo:
--- Quote from: schmitt trigger on November 06, 2018, 09:45:26 pm ---One has to remember the time when these books and articles were published........late 70s throughout the 80s.
Back in those days, the only way a young person would be able to gain technical knowledge was....was........gasp.....get ready for this......... reading books.
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Well, there were Techical School night classes!
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Technical books were either math heavy and intended for College EE courses. Or the simpler, hands-on type, with emphasis on learning thru building novel and fun projects. They were called "cookbooks" for a reason.
People like Don Lancaster, Forrest Mims, Doug Self and many others wrote the latter books.
To me in particular, Mr Mims was the best of the bunch. His notebook style, hand drawn, but very legible schematics were a joy to experiment with. Simple prose, good technical tips and advice, minimal details intended only to whet your appetite.
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I never saw much to interest me in "cookbooks"---- they were usually for things I had not the slightest interest in making, or contained a lot of stuff which I could find for myself in such things as the National Semiconductors manuals.( but then again, I wasn't "Just a stripling lad" during those years.)
There were quite a few technical books which, although they did include mathematics,also had written descriptions of things, so if you were weak on maths, you could "read around "it, & still get good value out of the text
The earlier editions of "Electronics Australia"(& it's Predecessors) the British publications "Wireless World",& "Practical Wireless" as well as "73" & the "ARRl Handbook, were the things I learnt quite a lot from.
rstofer:
--- Quote from: rhb on November 07, 2018, 06:30:44 pm ---The OP obviously has no grasp of what electronics was like in 1974 when the TTL Cookbook came out. That was 2 years before Ed Roberts introduced the Altair 8800. The microprocessor did not even exist. I sat in on an Electronics 101 course as a break from looking through a microscope all day. The instructor was a semiconductor physicist who designed and built a computer from scratch using TTL logic. By the time he finished it, the 8080 had come out and it was hopelessly obsolete.
I doubt that there was anyone of significance to hobbyists technically that did not have several of Don's books. Jobs wouldn't, but Wozniak would. The TV Typewriter book was published in 1976, the year the Altair was introduced. If you had an Altair you had Don's book.
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When I bought my Altair 8800 in early '75, it came with no IO boards and had a huge 256 BYTES of RAM. But NO IO. I bought a serial board fairly early and borrowed glass teletypes but eventually that source ran out and I had to do something with Don's TV Typewriter. Maybe I bought something from Southwest Technical... It's been a long time and memory fades.
Byte Magazine and Dr. Dobb's Journal were about the only sources of information on a periodic basis and Don Lancaster's books were much more detailed. As discussed above, they were wildly popular.
alpher:
--- Quote ---Byte Magazine and Dr. Dobb's Journal were about the only sources of information on a periodic basis and Don Lancaster's books were much more detailed. As discussed above, they were wildly popular.
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And here lies the problem, for some "Byte" and Don Lancaster are sort off contemporary things.
It's really hard to grasp for the younger folks, how much world changed in the last 20 years.
Don started to write good 10 years before "Byte", to the common belief, yes, there was electronics before 1980's. ;D ;D ;D
joeqsmith:
I had that dark green TTL cookbook. Eventually it fell apart at the binder. Layers of tape were holding it together. I passed it along to another hobbyist. It was a very good book for that time period. I got some other magazines but most were more general, so digital was hit and miss. I also had one of his graphics books but back then, graphics for me was basically non-existent.
Personally, I don't use terms like prodigy and guru in the way Webster's defines them. I will say that I have fond memories of that TTL cookbook. Of course, the down side to reading such books is you start building stuff like this when you get a little older:
https://youtu.be/5OUfx2F43ek?t=509
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