开云体育

Just joined the group, I have a lot of reading to do.

But this reminds me of 30 years ago when I operated an Automatic Network Analyzer at Hughes Aircraft.
I'm pretty sure it was an 8409C, but I can't confirm that on Google. It did S11, S21, S12 and S22 from 110 MHz to 18 GHz
And If my memory serves me (ha!) the two rack unit was $120,000 and the computer was $45,000. It looked similar to the attached photo.

And now I hold a low freq equivalent in my hand.

I actually have one of those here. Use some pieces but not full system :)

I was in sales with HP when the 8510 came out. $150k and was a break through instrument. Hardly had the "sell" it. Show it and take the order.

Ah-- the stories I could tell.. I was responsible for 3-4-5 VAX 11/785's around DC.. Sprint, NASA, ARMY, SPOT IMAGE(French NASA),Pentigon and it was a 32 bit computer. The CPU was 29 boards 3x3 feet. Ran on 2 -100amp 5 volt supplies. The back-plane was wire wrapped. It was a 0.9 MIPS machine. IBM was 1 MIP !! The MEMORY was another cabinet and pair of 100amp 5 volt supplies. Then came the peripherals cabinets.. To boot it, it required a LSI-11 ..a 5 board DEC computer and 8 inch floppies. The disk drive was 300Mb and as big as a washing machine.

Your Cellphone is more powerful, and I'm wow-ed with a week old Raspberry PI 400. I paid $70 for. Scary what if will be like in another 40 years. If only cars were less money as performance increased...

If the auto industry followed the same path as electronics a Rolls Royse
would cost $0.25 USD.
*Clyde K. Spencer*



On Wed, Dec 2, 2020 at 9:15 AM Larry Macionski via groups.io <am_fm_radio=
[email protected]> wrote:

Ah-- the stories I could tell.. I was responsible for 3-4-5 VAX 11/785's
around DC.. Sprint, NASA, ARMY, SPOT IMAGE(French NASA),Pentigon and it
was a 32 bit computer. The CPU was 29 boards 3x3 feet. Ran on 2 -100amp 5
volt supplies. The back-plane was wire wrapped. It was a 0.9 MIPS machine.
IBM was 1 MIP !! The MEMORY was another cabinet and pair of 100amp 5 volt
supplies. Then came the peripherals cabinets.. To boot it, it required a
LSI-11 ..a 5 board DEC computer and 8 inch floppies. The disk drive was
300Mb and as big as a washing machine.

Your Cellphone is more powerful, and I'm wow-ed with a week old Raspberry
PI 400. I paid $70 for. Scary what if will be like in another 40 years.
If only cars were less money as performance increased...

Today's Rolls Royce has more value in electronics than motive power.

And, yes, my cell phone is more powerful than the computers that took us to the moon, but my hearing aids have more computing power than the CDC 3300 mainframe that I worked with in the late 60s.

--Don

Yeah...The "Good Old Days"... My memories are of a 10-Ton semi trailer test
van with an HP 8510 and scads of other high-end equipment driven by an
HP9000 mini. And also my first scientific calculator circa 1977, a T1-59,
so named because it had the same computing power as a 1959 IBM mainframe.
AND, you didn't need the "Cake-Box" removable platter 300 MB CDC hard
drives for storage, just a tiny magnetic strip. I just saw the printer for
it a few days ago and I guess I'll find the calculator too, somewhere,
someday...?

Yes, at $140k, I used to haul the 8410B around KAFB (Kirtland AFB) in
Albuquerque strapped down to the back of a (gov. issue) flatbed truck.
Needless to mention, I drove v e r y c a r e f u l l y !!!

Dave - W?LEV

--
*Dave - W?LEV*
*Just Let Darwin Work*

Hate to say it guys-
Our generation really rocked in the Electronics department. Ken Burns where are you??? (Ken is the mastery behind the PBS series, "Empire of the Air", "Baseball" and "The Civil war")

Remember the days of getting on a plane with a Tektronics 465 scope - you did not leave it for baggage to handle, as God forbid you land and the scope is on a trip to the Bahamas.. We did component level repair.. Even on disk drives. Someone mentioned the CDC drives with "Cake-Box" removable platters. I had a head alignment pack and the $3,000 repair simulator, you could completely service that 80 or 300Mb disk drive. with The repair simulator and it was as big as your Tektronics 465 scope. Then you had 17-18 heads to align. You tightened them down with a inch-ounce torque wrench. I had one site with about 25 of those CDC 300Mb drives.. The operator loaded a platter, it didn't work, so he went down the line loading that bad platter in perfectly good disk drives faulting At least 5-8 before calling the boss, as it was a Saturday; he was alone. The boss, immediately stopped him from loading it in yet another disk drive, They called me in, I grabbed everything I had.. But I never had a complete set of heads.. There was an upper, a lower and a servo.. I had about 10-12. I spent 20-30 hours on site.. Removing heads, polishing them on IBM punch cards with toluene, to remove the iron oxide, then inspecting them as the heads flew only microns above the platters. Re installing them, changing absolute filters and I think I got better than 1/2 of the damaged drives back up, that weekend. Then ordering parts... Kids today have no idea, about how a disk drive works. What a low level format is, or bad block lists are. They replace sub assemblies. Do they even carry a soldering iron, or even a wire wrap tool?. They don' t carry scopes.

So here's to us old farts.. the guys that knew if a 200 ohm resistor was bad and you didn;t have one in your resistor box, what resistors you could connect together to replace that 200 ohm resistor...

I once flew into Syracuse NY, and rented a car -off to the hospital in Old Forge, NY. hours away.. I was working on a Gamma Camera.. Found a shorted 0.01uf It was taking down a power supply. Who has a 0.01uf cap go bad? Well, I Found that a ham worked at the hospital and we went with him to his hamshack and he had a baby food jar full of disk ceramics. We fixed the gamma camera. Had I had to go back to Syracuse to find an electronic parts store, It would of downed the equipment for another day plus doubled or tripled the bill..

Kids today do not have the where with all to be able to provide the customer satisfaction we did on a daily basis. Today's throw away society.

So I raise my beer to those who worked past midnight, and were back at other calls by 8am the next morning. And fixed things, didn't replace them.

And back then if you needed a component it was probably a 30-60 minute trip to the local Radio Shack, even in rural areas.

I drink to that and your story hit me perfectly.
I was a MEOREX Telex engineer back in the old days. The story about the computer operator takes one faulty disk-pack (200MB). Mount it on one drive, only for the heads to crash, move the pack to next drive, same thing and again and again, until he reach the end of the disk-sting (8 drives) He then realised there must be something else going on here... Yeah the good-ole 465 and 475. What a universal fault finding tool. I still have one, I bought one at a ham-fest for meagre ?50. I could not resist. Such a good old friend and it serves me great in my ham shack.
Sorry the topic is off nanoVNA but I couldn't resist joining in on stories like this and I'm not going to open up the subject of fault finding down to chip level on Sperry Univac mainframes, series 90 and 1100. GOSH!!! That’s another story, talking about working under pressure when a mainframe went down. Ugh!

Hi Larry,

I agree with you completely. I'm an "old iron" too, and my job is to educate
young students in (power)electronics, digital technology, and something
more. Also I'm a trainer for people, which want to get their HAM-licence.
These people are very interesting in electronics and HAM-stuff.
Not so my students.
I have a lot of electronic and measurement equipment in my shack and I know,
how to handle with it.
Most of the young people have only 4 interests:
1. Is there WiFi available?
2. Is the cellphone battery fully charged?
3. Where is the next party?
4. Are there enough girls to "screw them up".

Working in their job, get a good education for their profession and get the
knowledge to repair things instead of put them in the waste... NOTHING!
Cellphone battery is damaged? Exchange the battery? No, throw it away and
ask granny for a amount of bucks to get a new one.
This is our future?! Awful...
Too much money, to less interestings.

I guess, the chinese citizens will "overun" our economics with high speed in
the next future.

Mr. Spock says: "According to my calculations... you are an idiot". This is
our youth...

So, off-topic mode ends here.

Have a great day


vy 73, DL1UPK

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] Im Auftrag von
Larry Macionski via groups.io
Gesendet: Donnerstag, 3. Dezember 2020 17:58
An: [email protected]
Betreff: Re: [nanovna-users] My $165,000 VNA

Hate to say it guys-
Our generation really rocked in the Electronics department. Ken Burns where
are you??? (Ken is the mastery behind the PBS series, "Empire of the Air",
"Baseball" and "The Civil war")

Remember the days of getting on a plane with a Tektronics 465 scope - you
did not leave it for baggage to handle, as God forbid you land and the scope
is on a trip to the Bahamas.. We did component level repair.. Even on disk
drives. Someone mentioned the CDC drives with "Cake-Box" removable platters.
I had a head alignment pack and the $3,000 repair simulator, you could
completely service that 80 or 300Mb disk drive. with The repair simulator
and it was as big as your Tektronics 465 scope. Then you had 17-18 heads to
align. You tightened them down with a inch-ounce torque wrench. I had one
site with about 25 of those CDC 300Mb drives.. The operator loaded a
platter, it didn't work, so he went down the line loading that bad platter
in perfectly good disk drives faulting At least 5-8 before calling the boss,
as it was a Saturday; he was alone. The boss, immediately stopped him from
loading it in yet another disk drive, They called me in, I grabbed
everything I had.. But I never had a complete set of heads.. There was an
upper, a lower and a servo.. I had about 10-12. I spent 20-30 hours on
site.. Removing heads, polishing them on IBM punch cards with toluene, to
remove the iron oxide, then inspecting them as the heads flew only microns
above the platters. Re installing them, changing absolute filters and I
think I got better than 1/2 of the damaged drives back up, that weekend.
Then ordering parts... Kids today have no idea, about how a disk drive
works. What a low level format is, or bad block lists are. They replace sub
assemblies. Do they even carry a soldering iron, or even a wire wrap tool?.
They don' t carry scopes.

So here's to us old farts.. the guys that knew if a 200 ohm resistor was bad
and you didn;t have one in your resistor box, what resistors you could
connect together to replace that 200 ohm resistor...

I once flew into Syracuse NY, and rented a car -off to the hospital in Old
Forge, NY. hours away.. I was working on a Gamma Camera.. Found a shorted
0.01uf It was taking down a power supply. Who has a 0.01uf cap go bad?
Well, I Found that a ham worked at the hospital and we went with him to his
hamshack and he had a baby food jar full of disk ceramics. We fixed the
gamma camera. Had I had to go back to Syracuse to find an electronic parts
store, It would of downed the equipment for another day plus doubled or
tripled the bill..

Kids today do not have the where with all to be able to provide the customer
satisfaction we did on a daily basis. Today's throw away society.

So I raise my beer to those who worked past midnight, and were back at other
calls by 8am the next morning. And fixed things, didn't replace them.

Larry, you sure bring back memories!!!! While I was on the R&D, design,
and prototype end of things, we went through very similar 'exercises'. And
I venture a theory, time will tell if it hasn't already done so, that we
worked during the best of times in the electronic and technical
industries. Yes, troubleshooting to the part level sure taught us about
everything we needed to know about any circuit in existance or could be
imagined! In home brewing at present, if I don't have the required value
of something, the first thing I consider before hitting the Digikey site is
what do I have that can be seriesed or paralleled to yield the value I
need. Good tools to cultivate! In my experience over the last decade of
working, I found the newbies can't even tackle Ohm's Law, DC, don't even
mention complex sources or loads....... True: the
newbies have no clue, what-so-ever.

Thank you for taking me back to my 'fossil-in-the-making' days. Now
retired at 74 and value everything I learned in the process.

Dave - W?LEV

On Thu, Dec 3, 2020 at 4:57 PM Larry Macionski via groups.io <am_fm_radio=
[email protected]> wrote:

Hate to say it guys-
Our generation really rocked in the Electronics department. Ken Burns
where are you??? (Ken is the mastery behind the PBS series, "Empire of the
Air", "Baseball" and "The Civil war")

Remember the days of getting on a plane with a Tektronics 465 scope - you
did not leave it for baggage to handle, as God forbid you land and the
scope is on a trip to the Bahamas.. We did component level repair.. Even on
disk drives. Someone mentioned the CDC drives with "Cake-Box" removable
platters. I had a head alignment pack and the $3,000 repair simulator, you
could completely service that 80 or 300Mb disk drive. with The repair
simulator and it was as big as your Tektronics 465 scope. Then you had
17-18 heads to align. You tightened them down with a inch-ounce torque
wrench. I had one site with about 25 of those CDC 300Mb drives.. The
operator loaded a platter, it didn't work, so he went down the line loading
that bad platter in perfectly good disk drives faulting At least 5-8 before
calling the boss, as it was a Saturday; he was alone. The boss,
immediately stopped him from loading it in yet another disk drive, They
called me in, I grabbed everything I had.. But I never had a complete set
of heads.. There was an upper, a lower and a servo.. I had about 10-12. I
spent 20-30 hours on site.. Removing heads, polishing them on IBM punch
cards with toluene, to remove the iron oxide, then inspecting them as the
heads flew only microns above the platters. Re installing them, changing
absolute filters and I think I got better than 1/2 of the damaged drives
back up, that weekend. Then ordering parts... Kids today have no idea,
about how a disk drive works. What a low level format is, or bad block
lists are. They replace sub assemblies. Do they even carry a soldering
iron, or even a wire wrap tool?. They don' t carry scopes.

So here's to us old farts.. the guys that knew if a 200 ohm resistor was
bad and you didn;t have one in your resistor box, what resistors you could
connect together to replace that 200 ohm resistor...

I once flew into Syracuse NY, and rented a car -off to the hospital in Old
Forge, NY. hours away.. I was working on a Gamma Camera.. Found a shorted
0.01uf It was taking down a power supply. Who has a 0.01uf cap go bad?
Well, I Found that a ham worked at the hospital and we went with him to his
hamshack and he had a baby food jar full of disk ceramics. We fixed the
gamma camera. Had I had to go back to Syracuse to find an electronic parts
store, It would of downed the equipment for another day plus doubled or
tripled the bill..

Kids today do not have the where with all to be able to provide the
customer satisfaction we did on a daily basis. Today's throw away society.

So I raise my beer to those who worked past midnight, and were back at
other calls by 8am the next morning. And fixed things, didn't replace them.

--
*Dave - W?LEV*
*Just Let Darwin Work*

PS: I also remember those huge magnetic disks and the machines in which
they operated. About half the size of today's refrigerator/freezers which
stood about waist high. Heaven forbid, should anyone jar the floor on
which they stood resulting in a crashed head. The bearings were air, yes,
microns above the valued disk. How about the HP-9845 "computers"? Those
were the cat's meow in their day. And I started my career using slide
rules. Oh my,........now I'm going back to the Precambrian era........
And the first use of the PET PC in our design group - we had only one for
12 engineers? It was barely powerful enough to determine if all the piece
parts in a given functional circuit design could fit on the real estate
challenged board. Not even powerful enough for any simple circuit
simulations.........

Again, thank you for taking me back to my "fossil-in-the-making" days ! ! !
! Good memories!!!!! ????

Dave - W?LEV



On Thu, Dec 3, 2020 at 5:46 PM David Eckhardt via groups.io <davearea51a=
[email protected]> wrote:

Larry, you sure bring back memories!!!! While I was on the R&D, design,
and prototype end of things, we went through very similar 'exercises'. And
I venture a theory, time will tell if it hasn't already done so, that we
worked during the best of times in the electronic and technical
industries. Yes, troubleshooting to the part level sure taught us about
everything we needed to know about any circuit in existance or could be
imagined! In home brewing at present, if I don't have the required value
of something, the first thing I consider before hitting the Digikey site is
what do I have that can be seriesed or paralleled to yield the value I
need. Good tools to cultivate! In my experience over the last decade of
working, I found the newbies can't even tackle Ohm's Law, DC, don't even
mention complex sources or loads....... True: the
newbies have no clue, what-so-ever.

Thank you for taking me back to my 'fossil-in-the-making' days. Now
retired at 74 and value everything I learned in the process.

Dave - W?LEV

On Thu, Dec 3, 2020 at 4:57 PM Larry Macionski via groups.io <am_fm_radio=
[email protected]> wrote:

Hate to say it guys-
Our generation really rocked in the Electronics department. Ken Burns
where are you??? (Ken is the mastery behind the PBS series, "Empire of

the

Air", "Baseball" and "The Civil war")

Remember the days of getting on a plane with a Tektronics 465 scope - you
did not leave it for baggage to handle, as God forbid you land and the
scope is on a trip to the Bahamas.. We did component level repair.. Even

on

disk drives. Someone mentioned the CDC drives with "Cake-Box" removable
platters. I had a head alignment pack and the $3,000 repair simulator,

you

could completely service that 80 or 300Mb disk drive. with The repair
simulator and it was as big as your Tektronics 465 scope. Then you had
17-18 heads to align. You tightened them down with a inch-ounce torque
wrench. I had one site with about 25 of those CDC 300Mb drives.. The
operator loaded a platter, it didn't work, so he went down the line

loading

that bad platter in perfectly good disk drives faulting At least 5-8

before

calling the boss, as it was a Saturday; he was alone. The boss,
immediately stopped him from loading it in yet another disk drive, They
called me in, I grabbed everything I had.. But I never had a complete set
of heads.. There was an upper, a lower and a servo.. I had about 10-12. I
spent 20-30 hours on site.. Removing heads, polishing them on IBM punch
cards with toluene, to remove the iron oxide, then inspecting them as the
heads flew only microns above the platters. Re installing them, changing
absolute filters and I think I got better than 1/2 of the damaged drives
back up, that weekend. Then ordering parts... Kids today have no idea,
about how a disk drive works. What a low level format is, or bad block
lists are. They replace sub assemblies. Do they even carry a soldering
iron, or even a wire wrap tool?. They don' t carry scopes.

So here's to us old farts.. the guys that knew if a 200 ohm resistor was
bad and you didn;t have one in your resistor box, what resistors you

could

connect together to replace that 200 ohm resistor...

I once flew into Syracuse NY, and rented a car -off to the hospital in

Old

Forge, NY. hours away.. I was working on a Gamma Camera.. Found a shorted
0.01uf It was taking down a power supply. Who has a 0.01uf cap go bad?
Well, I Found that a ham worked at the hospital and we went with him to

his

hamshack and he had a baby food jar full of disk ceramics. We fixed the
gamma camera. Had I had to go back to Syracuse to find an electronic

parts

store, It would of downed the equipment for another day plus doubled or
tripled the bill..

Kids today do not have the where with all to be able to provide the
customer satisfaction we did on a daily basis. Today's throw away

society.

So I raise my beer to those who worked past midnight, and were back at
other calls by 8am the next morning. And fixed things, didn't replace

them.

--
*Dave - W?LEV*
*Just Let Darwin Work*

--
*Dave - W?LEV*
*Just Let Darwin Work*

I was once on a project and the local shop sent me a tech to help me out. I
had to replace some resistors on a board. Unsolder the old and then insert
and solder the new. The tech did not have any idea how to solder or even
how to use a soldering iorn.

On Thu, Dec 3, 2020, 11:57 AM Larry Macionski via groups.io <am_fm_radio=
[email protected]> wrote:

Hate to say it guys-
Our generation really rocked in the Electronics department. Ken Burns
where are you??? (Ken is the mastery behind the PBS series, "Empire of the
Air", "Baseball" and "The Civil war")

Remember the days of getting on a plane with a Tektronics 465 scope - you
did not leave it for baggage to handle, as God forbid you land and the
scope is on a trip to the Bahamas.. We did component level repair.. Even on
disk drives. Someone mentioned the CDC drives with "Cake-Box" removable
platters. I had a head alignment pack and the $3,000 repair simulator, you
could completely service that 80 or 300Mb disk drive. with The repair
simulator and it was as big as your Tektronics 465 scope. Then you had
17-18 heads to align. You tightened them down with a inch-ounce torque
wrench. I had one site with about 25 of those CDC 300Mb drives.. The
operator loaded a platter, it didn't work, so he went down the line loading
that bad platter in perfectly good disk drives faulting At least 5-8 before
calling the boss, as it was a Saturday; he was alone. The boss,
immediately stopped him from loading it in yet another disk drive, They
called me in, I grabbed everything I had.. But I never had a complete set
of heads.. There was an upper, a lower and a servo.. I had about 10-12. I
spent 20-30 hours on site.. Removing heads, polishing them on IBM punch
cards with toluene, to remove the iron oxide, then inspecting them as the
heads flew only microns above the platters. Re installing them, changing
absolute filters and I think I got better than 1/2 of the damaged drives
back up, that weekend. Then ordering parts... Kids today have no idea,
about how a disk drive works. What a low level format is, or bad block
lists are. They replace sub assemblies. Do they even carry a soldering
iron, or even a wire wrap tool?. They don' t carry scopes.

So here's to us old farts.. the guys that knew if a 200 ohm resistor was
bad and you didn;t have one in your resistor box, what resistors you could
connect together to replace that 200 ohm resistor...

I once flew into Syracuse NY, and rented a car -off to the hospital in Old
Forge, NY. hours away.. I was working on a Gamma Camera.. Found a shorted
0.01uf It was taking down a power supply. Who has a 0.01uf cap go bad?
Well, I Found that a ham worked at the hospital and we went with him to his
hamshack and he had a baby food jar full of disk ceramics. We fixed the
gamma camera. Had I had to go back to Syracuse to find an electronic parts
store, It would of downed the equipment for another day plus doubled or
tripled the bill..

Kids today do not have the where with all to be able to provide the
customer satisfaction we did on a daily basis. Today's throw away society.

So I raise my beer to those who worked past midnight, and were back at
other calls by 8am the next morning. And fixed things, didn't replace them.

Very interesting.

Although a retired doctor, my main hobby from the age of 10 was radio and electronics. I had jars of components salvaged from old 1960s televisions, drawers full of WW2 valves and a small handful of precious germaneum transistors.

I have actually polished disc heads- I got into vintage computers in the 1970s (long story from university onwards). It was an antique RK05 for a pdp8. I knew the emergency power fail head retract batteries were bad and I had just tripped over the mains cable to the cabinet. A loud bang of shorted mains, then the sound of the drive slowing down, then the screech as the heads touched the disc surface- there was no way to prevent it. I was using a 6ft tall rack of pdp8 stuff to act as a serial to parallel converter, between a Sinclair QL which was sending serial data printing out my thesis to parallel daisywheel printer !! This was in 1985. I still have the pdp8 (and some other antique computer stuff).

I saved the heads, but had to scrap the disc platter. I polished them still attached as I had no means of re-aligning them if I took them off.

As a lesson on esd protection (see other threads), the live mains wire had contacted the earth in the mains plug. One buffer chip was damaged on the pdp8 serial interface card from Sinclair QL. The interface card to the printer and the printer were ok. The rest of the pdp8 apart from the crashed disc drive head was ok. The Sinclair Ql was trashed (they cost ?400 in 1985) along with the converted portable television I was using as the monitor.

It delayed the printup of my MD thesis for some time as the main word processor (QL) was blown.

Steve L

Oh,.....yes....... The PDP11: a slide rule with a cord!

I forgot about the Sinclair. But, thanks for reminding me of those
days......

Dave - W?LEV

On Thu, Dec 3, 2020 at 6:27 PM Stephen Laurence <Gaslaurence@...>
wrote:

Very interesting.

Although a retired doctor, my main hobby from the age of 10 was radio and
electronics. I had jars of components salvaged from old 1960s televisions,
drawers full of WW2 valves and a small handful of precious germaneum
transistors.

I have actually polished disc heads- I got into vintage computers in the
1970s (long story from university onwards). It was an antique RK05 for a
pdp8. I knew the emergency power fail head retract batteries were bad and I
had just tripped over the mains cable to the cabinet. A loud bang of
shorted mains, then the sound of the drive slowing down, then the screech
as the heads touched the disc surface- there was no way to prevent it. I
was using a 6ft tall rack of pdp8 stuff to act as a serial to parallel
converter, between a Sinclair QL which was sending serial data printing out
my thesis to parallel daisywheel printer !! This was in 1985. I still have
the pdp8 (and some other antique computer stuff).

I saved the heads, but had to scrap the disc platter. I polished them
still attached as I had no means of re-aligning them if I took them off.

As a lesson on esd protection (see other threads), the live mains wire had
contacted the earth in the mains plug. One buffer chip was damaged on the
pdp8 serial interface card from Sinclair QL. The interface card to the
printer and the printer were ok. The rest of the pdp8 apart from the
crashed disc drive head was ok. The Sinclair Ql was trashed (they cost ?400
in 1985) along with the converted portable television I was using as the
monitor.

It delayed the printup of my MD thesis for some time as the main word
processor (QL) was blown.

Steve L

--
*Dave - W?LEV*
*Just Let Darwin Work*

Ah,I love the trip down Memory Lane this thread is taking.
Vax, HP2000, and IBM 370. Now THAT’S computing right there.

I can add one thought which I think sums this up. Life is analog. Digital is merely a, somewhat artifacted, simulation of life. Think any of these kids understand that all those ones and zeros are actually voltage? Beyond knowing the physical layer means the RJ45 jack (do they even know what Registered Jack is?), they have know idea how their stuff works.

I know I will never want for work as long as there are electrons to push and voltage to deliver.

Oh, and getoffamylawn!

More memory lane stuff – off topic but what the heck!
SAC HQ in the underground - IBM 704 with core memory in an oil bath to cool it! Was there when JFK was killed. The place went on yellow alert because of the lack of information. Pallets and more pallets of TP being brought in – just in case!


From: Geof Gibson via groups.io<mailto:Geofgibson@...>
Sent: Friday, December 4, 2020 9:44 AM
To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [nanovna-users] My $165,000 VNA

Ah,I love the trip down Memory Lane this thread is taking.
Vax, HP2000, and IBM 370. Now THAT’S computing right there.

I can add one thought which I think sums this up. Life is analog. Digital is merely a, somewhat artifacted, simulation of life. Think any of these kids understand that all those ones and zeros are actually voltage? Beyond knowing the physical layer means the RJ45 jack (do they even know what Registered Jack is?), they have know idea how their stuff works.

I know I will never want for work as long as there are electrons to push and voltage to deliver.

On Fri, 04 Dec 2020 06:43:54 -0800
"Geof Gibson via groups.io" <Geofgibson@...> wrote:

Ah,I love the trip down Memory Lane this thread is taking.
Vax, HP2000, and IBM 370. Now THAT’S computing right there.

I love reading these stories. Folks like you are the ones that I looked to for inspiration when I was younger. I guess I was the next generation back then.

It's not getting any better out here. A few years back we had some "repair engineers" in from a service center in EU for training. They were astonished that we could do component level SMT repairs on product. Even more so that our only tools were a pair of soldering irons and a heat gun. Experience and skill ruled.

Now the boards are so cheap from offshore fabs that it is not economical to repair them. Most of the younger technicians have no concept of component level troubleshooting or repair. They are module swappers and button pushers. I relish the few occasions I have to actually wield a test instrument or sling some solder these days. It's sad that I actually look forward to troubleshooting Windows based devices just to have something that makes me have to THINK.

73

-Jim
NU0C