BoatBanter.com - Now it's Maryland

On Sat, 26 Aug 2017 08:32:38 -0400, Keyser Soze
wrote:

On 8/26/17 1:08 AM, wrote:
On Sat, 26 Aug 2017 03:53:20 -0000 (UTC), Bill
wrote:

wrote:
On Sat, 26 Aug 2017 02:46:19 -0000 (UTC), Bill
wrote:

wrote:
On Fri, 25 Aug 2017 13:37:17 -0400,
wrote:

On Fri, 25 Aug 2017 10:23:23 -0700 (PDT), Its Me
wrote:

On Friday, August 25, 2017 at 1:06:07 PM UTC-4, Mr. Luddite wrote:
On 8/25/2017 9:53 AM, Its Me wrote:
On Friday, August 25, 2017 at 7:29:23 AM UTC-4, Mr. Luddite wrote:
On 8/24/2017 9:54 PM, wrote:
On Thu, 24 Aug 2017 19:40:52 -0400, Keyser Soze
wrote:

On 8/24/17 7:30 PM, wrote:

Here we go again. hehehehehe.

Another brain fart from Harry. I understand technical things are
beyond your comprehension but you don't need to be so proud of it.

I don't have any problems moving .jpg's to and fro. I know better than
to try to do so with my usenet provider in a "non-binary" newsgroup or
whatever was being tried that didn't work.

Oh, and I had more than 50 articles published in PC Week, PC Magazine,
BYTE and a few lesser pubs. I had a biweekly column in PC Week. Your
computer oriented technical articles consisted of...???

Uh huh. So If I go look at the archives of PC week or PC Mag I will
see a lot of "technical" articles from Harry Krause? We are not
talking about case styling and the feel of the keyboard are we?

They were probably letters to the editor.

In fairness, I remember reading something Harry wrote in some PC
magazine. He used to volunteer to do beta testing and provided feedback.

Yabut, he said he was published in BYTE. That was a highly technical
magazine written by very competent engineers. They published stuff
like schematics of computer circuits complete with timing diagrams
and sample code to perform complex functions. If true, they must have
needed some fluff filler piece because he doesn't have the
engineering chops to write anything that they would normally publish.

When it comes to computers, neither do I. :-)

I got a kick out of a visit from my younger son the other day. He
started a new job as a facilities manager for a company that uses
automatic, high volume packaging equipment. He took electronic
engineering courses when he attended MA Maritime but they only covered
digital logic circuits. They don't even teach theory anymore and vacuum
tubes, transistors, etc. are artifacts of ancient times.

One of the systems he's responsible for broke down due to a bad rotary
actuator. He was having a problem ordering a replacement because there
were two versions of it. One was a PNP type, the other a NPN. My son
had no clue what PNP or NPN meant. All he knew for sure was that they
had a magnet in them along with a small chip.

I explained he had a "Hall Effect" circuit and spent some time
explaining what PNP and NPN meant, drawing diagrams of transistors and
explaining what the base, emitter and collector were. Then I drew a
diagram of a vacuum tube with the cathode, screen grid and plate, while
explaining how it worked and the similarities in function to that of a
transistor that came later.

Now-a-days everything is on a chip the size of your little fingernail
and it probably contains a dozen or more and, or, nand or nor gates or
transistors used as gates.

It's worse than that. Those tiny little chips contain a whole lot more
than just gates. The days of building logic circuits using gates in
dedicated chips is pretty much gone. Now the vast majority is done
with programmable logic devices (PLDs) and their variants where you
just design the logic in an app and assign the inputs and outputs to
the pins, then program the chip to perform that operation. A complex
programmable logic device (CPLD) can contain 10's of thousand of logic
gates, and is programmed after being soldered on to the board with
serial data (usually JTAG) while in-circuit.

===

Amazing stuff, absolutely amazing. Electronics has come so far in my
lifetime that it has far surpassed anything I could have imagined. In
1957 I added a one transistor audio amplifier stage to a crystal set
that I had previously built as a cub scout. It worked surprisingly
well considering that it was built on a small 2x4 cutoff and had no
soldered connections. A friend of mine borrowed it and entered it in
a science fair without me knowing about it. He won 1st place

---

My start in this was a "kit" course when I was about 13-14. Every
month they sent you a bunch more parts and a book of things to try.
When you were all done you had an amplifier, a tuner and a few other
things that ended up being a regenerative AM radio among other things.
It was all done with 3 or 4 tubes. I used the amp long after I decided
a 5 bottle table radio was a whole lot better. I didn't really start
playing with transistors until I got to IBM although I knew a lot
about them from school.
As soon as I figured out IBM was scrapping the returns, they did not
get much back on the cards. I did learn what was failing on the card
tho because I was removing and testing components for my projects.
It saved us a few times because I was able to fix a card if we could
not get one right away.

In 1964 at NCR mainframe school, we were taught to trouble shoot the
boards. Were no IC's then, all transistors. We would trouble shoot the
boards during the night. 2 flip flops on a 6x8" board. Same as an 74ls74
ic. 1" x .5"

The last school I went to that talked about what was on the cards was
1401 support. The cards were actually made to be fixed and they had
test points on the outside edge of the card so you could scope the
bases of the transistors with the card installed. I was the only guy I
knew who ever fixed one.

We could scope them, but mostly used an ohm meter and checked the diodes
and transistors. The 315 RMC would get a random error and we would rattle
the boards looking for the broken leg. They used a water based cleaner
after the wave solder machine and the legs would corrode through.

We used a scope for just about everything. I was not really convinced
checking with a meter was anything like watching the circuit in
operation and figuring out why it wasn't. Some time the fault was just
that it was switching slow and you had a ramp, not a cliff or just not
a full level shift. That can give you all sorts of intermittent
failures.

You old farts ought to get together and discuss spark coils.

It would be more interesting than listening to you talk about all of
the people you fetched coffee for in your newspaper days or the ad
copy you have written.