As nostalgia or coincidence I'm about to shovel out and go to work in Waltham right past & next to the old Waverly Oaks Waltham Kurzweil Music location (Kurzweil Edu Sys still there).
In the mid late 80's as then a EE graduate I desperately wanted to work for either Tom Scholz or Ray's Music Business in Waltham as 1st choices. It seemed no one was looking for a green but eager engineer as it was another one of those recession like downturns that happen in 4-6 mini cycles...or so it seems. Instead I kept the momentum of my senior project 16 channel vocoder in a home spare bedroom studio somewhat mothballed still today, joined the AES (went to BBN meeting back in the day), developed & got a class D amp patent 20 years ago that turned more hobby than business startup, and stuck to dabbling in devices, luthery, and a back room studio. As a day job as an employyee and consultant intermixed I focused on consumer, industrial, and mostly medical devices. Instead of audio my 1st gig out of school in Cambridge was physiologic diagnostics signal processing with other MIT spin offs in the area (the founder, my 1st boss, mentor and friend was Ray K's room-mate at MIT small world).?
So back on topic and why I'm here - To this day I still have my K1000SE (upgraded to all but the 2nd sound block as I recall), several rack modules, and had an Atrari Mega ST for library management having picked up the later right at the Waverly Oaks office giving me a brief peek into the engineering going on there. I've decided during the covid furlough at home which became layoff to start turning the bedroom studio, now a storage, back into my tiny studio and practice room - it was always good therapy to bang on the drums, play some guitar, get lost in effects, and fire up good ole kurzweil or oberheim modules. So I'm guessing that old non gig'd gear will need recapping of electrolytics, tube amps will need all sorts of TLD, and kurzweil key & rack boxes will need some display work if not firmware upgrades. Did I horde any or enough windowded 27CXXX parts? Will my Needham's Parallel port programmer even work on anything today? Can I even find it or otherthings not thought about in so long? Well hopefully I can work on that over the next couple of years now back to work but wanting to keep working on such side projects.
Hopefully enough people are still here to share what they learn as i wil also try to do.
Cheers & thanks for keeping this going.
Bill
