Don Lancaster: RIP

I learned a lot from him too, back around 1980. My first engineering job (1981-83) was doing 2/3 of the time- and frequency-keeping electronics for the first civilian DBS system ( Spacetel from AEL Microtel).

The friendly acquaintance with logic ICs that I got from Don’s books made a great difference—he encouraged all sorts of lateral thinking about applications.

Didn’t prevent me from arguing with him about the usefulness of TECs, which he was fond of trashing in his later years. ;)

Memory eternal!

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

<snipped silly claim>

Don Lancaster wasn't a product designer. He was a populariser. People who did serious electronics read higher level books that the "CMOS Cookbook".

Serious people read the peer-reviewed literature.

There were plenty of less comprehensive texts around before AoE.

I bought this book back when I was a graduate student, and found it very useful.

Nothing Dona Lancaster wrote would have been anything like as useful.

<snip>

Bizarre.

For popular projects, TECs are much too cranky to be useful.

There are specific projects where their virtues outweigh their defects, but you do have to know exactly what you are doing, and even Jim William's wasn't as specific as he might have been about their defects. When I talked to him about it he invoked the Steven Hawking principle - each equation in a text halves the number of readers, which isn't actually true for application notes.

<snip>

TEC? Tactical Electromagnetic Coordinator? Total Estimated Cost?

Lancaster's TV typewriter popularized proto-PCs prior to Pong's home edition. The TV typewriter provided powerless people with a taste of control - an opening salvo to subtly subvert TV's totalitarian tyranny. Although my _CMOS Cookbook_'s covered with dust its bookmarks denote the last few topics to pique my interest:

• A 4046 rundown circuit for electronic dice or roulette * A bucket brigade built of 4013s for a Digital to Analog converter * A 4518 and 4511 LED display driver * A 4066 used to control a +1/-1 amplifier God rest his soul.

Danke,

(1) I can't stand Australia. (2) What a complete asshole.

<snip>

Thermoelectric coolers. Phil should have called them Peltier junctions.

<snip>

Hobbyist rather than revolutionary. Once they got to be mass market devices at mass market prices they made a real difference.

Don might have got a few hobbyist into that stuff early, but he was more an early adopter than a force for change.

<snip>

Your problem. Lots of people have the same idea about America - Donald Trump has made that group more numerous

You haven't been all that specific about who you mean. You were responding to Don, KB7RPU, who is American rather than Australian, and who also seems to have a sentimental fondness for Don Lancaster, which I didn't share.

Thermoelectric cooler.

>

Is he from Australia dumbass? You know what?

-- f*ck you -- and I'll say that to have Don Lancaster's back.

And you chose to shit all over what is basically a talk at a funeral. Did not realize your issues were *that* serious.

Sci. electronics.designs isn't a forum for funeral eulogies, and Don Lancaster spent a lot of effort advertising himself as an electronics guru to people who didn't know much about electronics, diverting their attention (and money) from people who knew quite a bit more.

I have a serious issue with frauds, and Don Lancaster skated close to being an outright fraud. What he advertised was more or less adequate, but very limited.

Poor choice of hero.

Whatever the group is this is obviously talk at a funeral.

I don't know him at all, this thread is the first time I encounter his name. However I do know what is appropriate at a funeral and what is very inappropriate; you should know better, no matter whether your judgment of who/what he was is correct or wrong.

A funeral is a ceremony held in a church, or perhaps a funeral parlour. What got posted here were comments about a guy who happens to be dead.

There is no such thing as a funeral thread. It's not as if Don posted here regularly, if at all. His pretensions to be a n electronics guru wouldn't have lasted long if he had.

Charles Petzold had a similar experience to mine and many others’, it sounds like.

I liked Petzold’s stuff on OS/2 BITD.

Get an old copy of his Active Filter Cookbook and you'll see a glimpse of Lancaster's personality.

Bill, you're out of line here. Let it drop, please.

-- john, KE5FX

<snip>

As an side, Petzold's _Programming Windows_ is another dust collector on my bookshelf.

Stan Veit wrote the gospel of Personal Computer history. Lancaster's mentioned throughout Veit's book:

Lancaster's "Serial Interface" article appears in very first issue of _Byte_:

Many Lancaster books are available at archive:

Lancaster's proximity to Jim Thompson makes me wonder how often their paths crossed.

Danke,

Compare it with Williams and Taylor's "Electronic Filter Design Handbook" and you'll have the measure of his technical acumen.

I don't want personality in a textbook - I want information.