Why Electronics?

[nick.sek]

Hey everybody, I finished watching Dave's "When I was a boy" and decide to make my own blog on the same topic. And I was wondering what got you into electronics?

[free_electron]

Took a litle pocket 'transistor' radio  apart at age six and 'tightened' all the screws on the mf transformers .... the end result was that one transistor got very hot and i burned my finger ... My parents decided to 'channel' my curiosity and got me a radioshack 100-in-1 experimenters kit ... at age 8 i etched my first pcb. I have an uncle that designed fire alarm systems so he helped me out by showing this ...

After that all hell broke loose....

[TriodeTiger]

My father or uncle had a 50-in-one kit from their childhood and showed it to me when I was a little boy, from at least the early 70's/80's. I was amazed that I can make an LED blink, make a light detector, and listen to sounds on the crystal earpiece included. I got discouraged when it required 20 whole connections to make an AM radio transmitter, how I had no clue.

Took electronics in highschool, maybe it was a little fast paced and I hadn't gotten much out of it. Found the workbook years later and was just captivated by it all, the formulas, what you can do with just a few simple concepts.

[siliconmix]

just fascinated by radio as a very young kid.

[G7PSK]

When I was about eight my parents moved into an old rambling Victorian old vicarage. In the attic I found a glass cylinder with brass ends a black piece of something at one end and a ball joint at the other which had a piece of wire poking into the black thing. I asked my father what it was and he told me it was part of an old crystal set, My father found me a circuit diagram and we set about building the rest of the radio turning up the coli former on an old wood lathe he had getting the tuning capacitor out of an old radio from the junk yard and when we found the cats whisker had lost its spring we got a diode out of an old television that also came from the junk yard. When I took it to school others wanted the unit, so I built more. I ended up spending a lot of time over the next few years in that junk yard which used to get all the rubbish from the PYE works in Cambridge. I was fascinated by the stuff that was being dumped and took a lot home to take apart and find out how it worked. Truly wonderful times, these days the health and safety brigade would ensure that it could not happen.