Don Lancaster: RIP

All experts were young once, and a lot used to read that kind of thing. It's all part of the learning process. If you have a problem with that it's no-one else's problem.

Bad text books create lots of problems. You have to be exposed to good ones. and junior engineers who haven't, to appreciate how bad the problems can be.

You doesn't seem to have been.

Reading bad ones can be educational too. Don knew how to interest youngsters in electronics. If you don't appreciate the value of that, really who cares.

Obviously you don't know what electronics books I've read. You're just determined to look silly again. Cue more excessive insecurity.

Only if you have read several different text-books. Bad text books are mostly bad in what they leave out, though they can be bad in using misleading concepts, like "leakage inductance".

There are better and worse ways of doing that. Don did tout himself as a guru, and he wasn't quite thorough enough to have earned that status.

The reference was to people who had been messed up by bad textbooks. You don't know enough to know what that means, so you may qualify as an example. I do know that you haven't understood enough good electronics texts, even if I don't know the route that got you into your current lamentable state of ignorance.

You don't get tired of being a bitter old man, do you.

Tabby does bring out my particularly bitter aspects. I wouldn't study his posts to find out why I find him irritating - it's not a rewarding exercise.

His books and articles, and Popular Electronics mag, got zillions of kids interested in electronics, far better than any textbooks would have done. His style, whether it was instinctive or deliberate, was accessable and fun for beginners

One could get Popular Electronics at a supermarket. I'd toss one in our cart, or just read it while my parents shopped.

What a concept, "Popular Electronics"

In your useless opinion, Wilma!

It's a terrible, fatal, and voluntary disease.

Everything has to be about him. He'll tell you that he is the most important man to ever have walked the earth. He is a male 'Karen'.

I still have several of his books. The first was his 'TV Typewriter' which taught me the basics of using logic ICs. It was basically a computer terminal, without a com port, and early designs used shift registers instead of RAM. I think that I still have a couple 2513 chips that stored the character codes.

Like you said, his style was like an informal Electronics class. Similar to how I taught Electronics at a High School in the late '60s.

As usual, you are arguing with a brick wall. No one will have anything nice to say when he's gone, if he continues being like this.

You can still read them:

What a bizarre idea. My father had some 25 patents to his name - and so do two of my friends. I've got three. I'm not in an position to claim that I'm in any way more important than any of them. Mike Terrell imagines that I'd stretch out way beyond that ...

Even more unlikely. Mike Terrell isn't very bright, so he does tend to get the wrong end of the stick. He may be confusing me with John Larkin, who does take himself seriously, but nowhere near that seriously.

Who were those two kids that had a tech adventure story every month? Not Ben&Jerry, but maybe Carl and somebody.

There were so many electronics magazines back then!

And literally - on purpose - tons of military surplus electronics that was almost free. As an under-wing radar pod for $70, or a radiosonde for a few dollars, or a spiffy CRT display for about $10. Beautiful tubes almost free.

Kids should tinker with electronics when they are young, to get instincts. Then later, when they get the formal textbook education, things click. Don really helped with that.

That's a possibility, of course; it's not the best introduction to hardware description language, nor to circuit analysis, nor to filter theory, nor antenna design...

Abstraction has its place, as does tinkering. Edison famously said an inventor needs a good imagination and lots of junk; that's OK, but we needed Steinmetz's math just as much.

I started building stuff when I was 10 years old, along about 1970. It was relatively accessible to someone with an interest, even without any sort of mentor. (My brother was interested, but not really a builder.)

We do eventually, that’s true. But all the best engineers whom I’ve known well have started out as hobbyists.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

not even worth responding to is it.

He and his ilk creates a hugely sucessful phenomenon. Slow man's failure to appreciate that says a thing or 2.