Author Topic: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?  (Read 35417 times)

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Online SiliconWizard

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #25 on: November 07, 2018, 01:10:24 am »
Unless we talk about actual sect gurus, calling oneself a "guru" is kind of tongue-in-cheek anyway, as "guru" often bears a slightly negative image. I don't think that someone really full of themselves would really call themselves a guru.

 
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Offline rhb

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #26 on: November 07, 2018, 01:14:18 am »
As for calling himself a "guru" (if he ever did)

His website is called the Guru's Lair
And he claims 1800 articles and 36 books, wow that's a lot of work.
https://www.tinaja.com/glair01.shtml

I should have registered that.   "Guru" is sort of a null word for old guys like me. I knew some people who were for a time  members of the Divine Light Mission.  I'll let Wikipedia fill in the details for younger readers.

Dave, you have a long way to go to catch up to Don.  But then you're a lot younger, so there is still time.  But you'll have to work at it.
 

Offline rstofer

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #27 on: November 07, 2018, 01:27:02 am »
His books helped a good number of us get started back in the '70s. If you've only just heard of him, you're clearly not one of us.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Lancaster

That's exactly the point.  At the time he did some outstanding work and he will always be a big player to folks who were there at the time.

He also did a couple of video books: "Cheap Video Cookbook"  and "Son of Check Video Cookbook" in addition to the CMOS, TTL and Active Filter books.  The Cheap Video Cookbook was especially important since we had to use conventional TVs as monitors.
 
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Offline In Vacuo VeritasTopic starter

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #28 on: November 07, 2018, 02:57:53 pm »
To help us understand that perspective, please give links to your last half dozen or so publications.

The other day I went to a restaurant. The food was not good so the chef asked me how many meals I cooked.

He sure showed me.

Hint: your "argument" is nonsense
 

Offline rhb

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #29 on: November 07, 2018, 03:37:02 pm »
You've been ignorantly disparaging someone who was *the* dominant factor for many of us to get started with digital electronics.  I was never a Forrest Mims fan.  But I was, and will always be a big fan of Don.  Don taught us how to work at the limits of the technology of the time under tight cost constraints. Don's books were written to help  hobbyists fulfill their goals 40 years ago.  The "TTL Cookbook" went through six press runs in the first two years.  The "CMOS Cookbook" went through 5 runs in the first 3 years.   The other books were equally popular.  Don's books sold in the millions.

Your first post demonstrated that you had not given any serious attention to Don's work. Why you would want to launch what is basically a personal attack on someone you know nothing about is beyond me.  And also treading very close to deserving being banned.  Were it my decision you would be just for the nasty attitude you have displayed.
 
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Offline RandallMcRee

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #30 on: November 07, 2018, 03:53:20 pm »
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.

 
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Offline cgroen

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #31 on: November 07, 2018, 04:00:29 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?


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  :-\
 

Offline james_s

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #32 on: November 07, 2018, 04:45:22 pm »
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.
 
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Offline rrinker

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #33 on: November 07, 2018, 05:28:36 pm »
 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
 
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Offline ArthurDent

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #34 on: November 07, 2018, 05:48:05 pm »
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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Offline Richard Crowley

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #35 on: November 07, 2018, 06:11:29 pm »
The other day I went to a restaurant. The food was not good so the chef asked me how many meals I cooked.
He sure showed me.
Hint: your "argument" is nonsense

Wow, speaking of nonsense......
 
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Offline rhb

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #36 on: November 07, 2018, 06:30:44 pm »
I had a quick scan of my library.  I have at least 5 of Don's books.  Quite likely 7 or 8.  The only author from that period who  comes close to Don is Joseph Carr with John Lenk a distant 3rd.

Don is probably the most successful ($$$$) general audience electronics writer ever by a very wide margin. If you're that successful you do what *you* want to do.  Not what someone else wants you to do.

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.

Don's books were full of clever tips like using a memory chip to implement complex arbitrary logic which is exactly what FPGAs do today.  Don understood and wrote to his audience better than any other author on digital electronics.  Carr's focus is RF and Lenk's was repair.

I think the cook's was response was a polite "f*** off punk".  Doubtless the OP demanded to see the chef and it was the only response the chef could think of.
 
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Offline In Vacuo VeritasTopic starter

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #37 on: November 07, 2018, 06:42:54 pm »
The other day I went to a restaurant. The food was not good so the chef asked me how many meals I cooked.
He sure showed me.
Hint: your "argument" is nonsense

Wow, speaking of nonsense......

Having a hard time following my reply? Asking someone else how well they can cook has noting to do with the meal in front of them.
Just like asking how many articles I wrote has nothing to do with what I think of someone else's articles.

If I used your logic, I could never criticize a car unless I built one (or even more), etc.

Is that so hard to grasp?
 

Offline Simon

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #38 on: November 07, 2018, 06:59:56 pm »
why is it your threads are always controversial? you are a right pain in the ass on this forum. One day you will push me to get my hammer out!

Online CatalinaWOW

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #39 on: November 07, 2018, 08:35:43 pm »
The other day I went to a restaurant. The food was not good so the chef asked me how many meals I cooked.
He sure showed me.
Hint: your "argument" is nonsense

Wow, speaking of nonsense......

Having a hard time following my reply? Asking someone else how well they can cook has noting to do with the meal in front of them.
Just like asking how many articles I wrote has nothing to do with what I think of someone else's articles.

If I used your logic, I could never criticize a car unless I built one (or even more), etc.

Is that so hard to grasp?

Perhaps you will understand your argument turned around.   People paid for those writings of Don Lancaster.  No one sells that much material if those buying don't find value in it.  I personally didn't like everything he wrote, but found way more than half to be of interest.  The remainder was mostly good enough stuff, just not of interest to me.  Stuff like his PostScript mania.  In your terms that is like saying I enjoyed the appetizer and main course but didn't care for the deserts.  Does that make a bad cook?  Other people at the table liked the desert but didn't care for the appetizer.
 
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Offline rhb

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #40 on: November 07, 2018, 09:02:19 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?  ::)

Seems a pretty good description of you, except you haven't written anything other than some offensive forum posts.

Quote

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?

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?

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.
« Last Edit: November 08, 2018, 01:33:38 am by rhb »
 
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Offline vk6zgo

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #41 on: November 08, 2018, 02:37:38 am »
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.
Well, there were Techical School night classes!
Quote

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.

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.
 

Offline rstofer

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #42 on: November 08, 2018, 03:34:48 am »
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.

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.

 

Offline alpher

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #43 on: November 08, 2018, 03:50:37 am »
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.
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
 

Offline joeqsmith

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #44 on: November 08, 2018, 04:17:49 am »
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


Online CatalinaWOW

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #45 on: November 08, 2018, 04:18:53 am »
Yep.  Today's folks can hardly comprehend that at first, booting a computer meant entering a loader program by setting the bits of memory using switches on the front of a computer.  This wasn't just the hobby world, the minicomputers like the PDP series and HP 1000 series worked that way too.  It wasn't as big a problem as it might seem because core memory was non-volatile and you usually didn't have to do all that switch flipping every day.  And while it would have been practical by the time the Altair and others came out to put that loader in a ROM, the people buying those computers had cut their teeth on those commercial machines and wanted their home computer to be a "real" computer.  It took a few years to grow  out of that mindset.
 

Offline tpowell1830

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #46 on: November 08, 2018, 04:46:18 am »
Unless we talk about actual sect gurus, calling oneself a "guru" is kind of tongue-in-cheek anyway, as "guru" often bears a slightly negative image. I don't think that someone really full of themselves would really call themselves a guru.

Yes, it's strange how the language morphs and evolves. I remember, at the time, that a "guru" was some sort of mystic from the middle east and was associated with achieving nirvana through budhism. The "gurus" came to the US in a wave associated with the Beatles, who, at the time, had visited the middle east, (I think India?) and had their mind expanded by smoking hemp, tasking LSD and listening to these gurus explain how to achieve inner peace and achieve the ultimate nirvana. This was adopted by the "hippies" of the time and, along with LSD and other mind bending drug use, opened their arms to these gurus of the middle east and India. There was a tremendous influx of these gurus into these sects in the west, but mostly to the US. EDIT: Nowadays, gurus are synonymous with someone who is an expert. END EDIT

So, at the time, any mention of anyone being a "guru", a middle eastern or Indian holy man came to mind (and citars would play in the mind), and for the more conservative folks, this was somewhat of a joke. This is why Don tried to depict himself, jokingly, as a "holy man" or, in a word, "guru".

I read Don's articles in the magazines, when I could get them, but always thought that this was a bit out of reach for me at the time because I was a poor young father, who had no money and no time for hobbies. Without the very simplest of measuring instruments available to me, I could not pursue this interest. I would still read the articles and wanted very much to get the devices and experiment, though. Don was a force for young people interested in the hobby, or in professional electronics design. In my book, he was one of the very few friends of hobbyists at the time and opened up avenues that otherwise would not have been available to someone who was unable to go to college and study electronics.

Again, those who are young have missed out on the most important period in the history of electronics and that Don was a pioneer. In a way, I feel very sad that the young folks of today did not experience the revolution that was occurring back then. I know that I felt it in my bones at the time. I am not trying to take away anything from today's advances in the industry, but anyone in that time period who happened to understand logic circuits and also happened upon a PDP-8 can not grasp the significance.

This was just my take on history, some of you may have experienced it differently.
« Last Edit: November 08, 2018, 04:50:07 am by tpowell1830 »
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Offline james_s

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #47 on: November 08, 2018, 05:51:05 am »
At least throughout most of my life, "guru" has been a common term to describe anyone who knows enough to be one of those experts who everyone goes to for information. It doesn't have to be the original definition of a far east mystic or whatever.
 

Offline tpowell1830

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #48 on: November 08, 2018, 06:15:38 am »
At least throughout most of my life, "guru" has been a common term to describe anyone who knows enough to be one of those experts who everyone goes to for information. It doesn't have to be the original definition of a far east mystic or whatever.

I guess I would ask if you were around at that time, because that is when guru came to be synonymous with expert, not before.

I do agree that Don is/was an expert in the '70s and '80s, but in the context of the time that he was doing his best work in the '70s, the context that I was talking about was why he jokingly said he was a guru (or whatever).
« Last Edit: November 08, 2018, 06:38:52 am by tpowell1830 »
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Offline rhb

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Re: Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
« Reply #49 on: November 08, 2018, 02:34:04 pm »
@rstofer I had one encounter with an 8800B in response to an ad in the student newspaper.  It turned out to be someone I already knew.  I sat with him and a couple of others and we struggled and failed to get a simple blinky light loop entered via the front panel.  There was a TV typewriter terminal sitting nearby, but there was no interface board available yet.  Much less a ROM monitor.

For the benefit of younger readers, a ROM monitor is a *very* minimal program that communicates over an RS-232 serial line and allows you to load images by reading from disk by track and sector addressing, dump or modify memory, etc.  The standard was a 2 KB ROM.  So the same functions as what is now called a BIOS courtesy of Gary Kildall's influence and IBM's naming.  But with the benefit that it had a command line which IBM did not provide.

@tpowell1830  Excellent summary of the times.  Those were heady days because all manner of small things were happening which were changing the world forever, even though most people didn't realize it.  And none of  us could imagine that one day for $5K (1970 $)  you could buy a machine with a terabyte of core and several teraflops of performance that could sit under your desk and not cook you.

Don's business name is Synergetics.  Don saw better than most how the individual bits would fall together and  the whole would be far greater than the pieces.

And how many million seller authors will answer the phone and talk to random readers about their technical problems?  I'm sure he picked up some nice consulting contracts that way.  But today someone as successful as Don would have lots of people to screen out 15 year olds and the like.

There is a real problem in the tech sector with not knowing  history.  I have seen the same mistakes made over and over as a new generation came into the workforce.  I benefited greatly from reading about the history of computing in the 1940 to 1980 time frame before I got involved.

In the early 90's on my first contract job at a major oil company I counted 8 people an hour through my cubicle with questions.  That made writing software rather difficult.  So I went to my supervisor to discuss it.  We arranged that a regular employee would prescreen questions.  The situation was so bad that I would often say, "Obviously you have me confused with someone who knows what they are doing."

I'm quite sure that if someone had referred to me as a "guru" in my hearing I'd have started doing some elaborate parody of a 1970's guru.  I can do a wicked parody of Oral Roberts or Garner Ted Armstrong style preaching.

"I want you to reach out, put your hand on the seismic section.  Feel the power of the vibrations saying, "I've got oil.  I'm going to make you rich."   Can I have a witness?  Brother, will you testify for those who have not yet felt the tingles and don't believe?"
 
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