General > General Technical Chat
Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"?
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rstofer:

--- Quote from: vk6zgo on November 08, 2018, 02:37:38 am ---
--- 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.

--- End quote ---
Well, there were Techical School night classes!
--- End quote ---

Actually, there weren't.  I graduated college in '73 and we were still using slide rules.  The HP 35 calculator came out in '72 - the first scientific calculator but not programmable.  I couldn't afford it at the time so I kept on using the 'slip stick'.  The HP 65 (3rd in series) introduced programmability.

The Intel 4004 uP came out in '72 but it wasn't widely adopted by the hobby community.  The 8008 came out in '72 as well and it became somewhat popular among those who built their own machines.  There were several memorable articles about these machines.  The 8080 came out in '74 and the Altair 8800B came out in early '75 and we were finally off to the races.  The Altair cost around $400 and so did qty 1 8080 chips.  Buy the chip or buy the machine - either way.

I started grad school in '75 and we had an 'Engineering Seminar' class the first semester.  For a topic, we chose microprocessors and we scrounged up every bit of data we could on the newly emerging processors.  A lot of paper writing that semester!

Electronics, at the uP level, was pretty much unheard of in the hobby community in those years.  Small computers, priced where an individual could afford them, just didn't happen until the Altair 8800B came out.

And then the hobby exploded!  Bill Gates offered up several incantations of Altair Basic but you had to buy MITS memory boards to qualify to buy Basic.  It was widely copied!  I have Bill Gates' column in the MITS newsletter complaining about people stealing his software.  Well, he got even for that!

I remember using paper tape and audio tapes.  I built a floppy controller board using the Western Digital 1771 chip and installed CP/M some time in '76.

Then in '80 along came UCSD Pascal - those were the days!

It's good to look back at where we came from.
rstofer:

--- Quote from: alpher 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.

--- End quote ---
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

--- End quote ---

Of course there was!  We had Heathkits when I was a kid.  The company was founded in 1926.

I built the 8W audio amplifier when I was about 12 ('57) and my dad and I build a shortwave radio from the ARRL handbook when I as about 10 - say around '55.  Popular Electronics was my favorite (and only) magazine. 

I've been fooling around with this stuff for a very long time.  But the explosion happened in '75.  An entire industry was created around Intel.  None of this stuff existed before '75.

I remember the transition from transistor logic to RTL to DTL to TTL and eventually CMOS.  A flip-flop used to take quite a bit of board space.  Now I can get a million in a chip the size of a postage stamp.

Don Lancaster had the exact skills necessary to help us along when this thing started up.  I don't do analog very much (other than analog computing) but I would certainly think his Active Filters book would be required reading.
rstofer:
Despite the negative OP, this thread is fun!  A lot of us share a common history and it has been an amazing ride!
Imagine, a time before C ('72), a time when FORTRAN ('57) ruled the scientific community and COBOL ('60) was the language of choice for business.  Or maybe when Algol ('58) showed us the right way to program.

Imagine!  I was writing FORTRAN before C was invented!  How cool is that?

The last 50 years have been outrageous!  I wonder what comes next?
tpowell1830:

--- Quote from: rstofer on November 08, 2018, 03:04:40 pm ---
--- Quote from: vk6zgo on November 08, 2018, 02:37:38 am ---
--- 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.

--- End quote ---
Well, there were Techical School night classes!
--- End quote ---

Actually, there weren't.  I graduated college in '73 and we were still using slide rules.  The HP 35 calculator came out in '72 - the first scientific calculator but not programmable.  I couldn't afford it at the time so I kept on using the 'slip stick'.  The HP 65 (3rd in series) introduced programmability.

The Intel 4004 uP came out in '72 but it wasn't widely adopted by the hobby community.  The 8008 came out in '72 as well and it became somewhat popular among those who built their own machines.  There were several memorable articles about these machines.  The 8080 came out in '74 and the Altair 8800B came out in early '75 and we were finally off to the races.  The Altair cost around $400 and so did qty 1 8080 chips.  Buy the chip or buy the machine - either way.

I started grad school in '75 and we had an 'Engineering Seminar' class the first semester.  For a topic, we chose microprocessors and we scrounged up every bit of data we could on the newly emerging processors.  A lot of paper writing that semester!

Electronics, at the uP level, was pretty much unheard of in the hobby community in those years.  Small computers, priced where an individual could afford them, just didn't happen until the Altair 8800B came out.

And then the hobby exploded!  Bill Gates offered up several incantations of Altair Basic but you had to buy MITS memory boards to qualify to buy Basic.  It was widely copied!  I have Bill Gates' column in the MITS newsletter complaining about people stealing his software.  Well, he got even for that!

I remember using paper tape and audio tapes.  I built a floppy controller board using the Western Digital 1771 chip and installed CP/M some time in '76.

Then in '80 along came UCSD Pascal - those were the days!

It's good to look back at where we came from.

--- End quote ---

Yes, this was the time of the engineers with pocket protectors and slide rule scabbards hanging from their belts. I started learning programming in the early '80s in BASIC and Pascal on CPM. I thought that I wanted to be a programmer but the world put me back on track into electronics.

This has no negativity towards the younger crowd here, but just an emphasis on the fact that so many changes in the electronics and computer world happened in this time and I was so very fortunate to be in the middle of it. To me, it was a very exciting time.
rrinker:
 I'm not quite THAT old, but FORTRAN was my second high level language, after BASIC. And I even got to use it, post college, in my work environment, in the late 80's.
By the time I got my first computer, there were far fancier machines available, but all well beyond my Jr. High grass cutting budget, so I started with a small single board machine with direct machine language programming. And I'm glad I did, it's a perspective you don;t get these days where even your phone is a more powerful computer than any available back then. By the time I started college, the IBM PC was available, but hadn't quite taken off yet - that came the following year. Universities were in transition - one of my classes was in 8080 assembly programming, and it was done on S-100 bus 8080 systems with 8" floppy drives (not Altair or Imsai, not sure exactly who made them). By the time I gradated, the whole campus was networked, including all dorm rooms, AT class machines were common (I had an 8MHz XT clone with EGA video), and lots of other things. It was a time of more than exponential rate of change.
 I still have that first computer, and it still works. I showed it to my kids not too long ago, they are in their 20's. All they kept saying was "but what can it DO?" I remember enough of the opcodes for the processor to write some simple on/off blinky kind of things, but of course in the age of photorealistic rendered graphics in everything, they were of course not impressed. What can it do? Besides teach you where it all came from? I guess not much.... To not recognize that, I think, is a great tragedy.
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