Don Lancaster: RIP

They were 'Carl and Jerry'.

That website has several other magazine archives.

I loved the 'ARRL Handbook', in our Junior High library. It not only had home brewed equipment that you could build, but it had a wealth of information about how to create working projects, along with construction methods to make it work and have a decent appearance. Many pages of Vacuum tube data, and a small section of advertising for companies that sold components, test equipment and tools.

Not only military surplus. Free junk Radios and TVs plus other electronics just for the asking. I put a couple line request in my high school's newsletter. We got over 100 TVs plus other electronics for hands on experience. I taught the other students how to troubleshoot the better equipment, and used the rest for parts. We sold enogh repaired equipment to pay for the construction ov a very nice Amateur radio station for the school. We had a nice HF station, and one of the first Two Meter repeaters in the state of Ohio. Several students from that class became EEs.

Then I donated about 20 remaining working TVs to the school for classrooms.

You confuse yourself. Some of my work in Microwave went to the ISS. I didn't care about patents, since it was a very niche field.

Old radios and TV sets could be scavengened for parts, like transformers, leaded Rs and Cs, tubes and later transistors. It's hard to build anything from a junked digital thing nowadays.

There aren't many electronic surplus stores now either. Those were great fun to explore. Haltek, Halted, Weird Stuff, Mike Quinn around here.

I have the 1946 edition of The Radio Amateur's Handbook. 1946 was a good year for me.

The only comparable thing I can think of nowadays is Maker Spaces.

I designed some flight and ground test hardware for the S1B, the first stage of the moon rocket. I think NASA deliberately allocated some non-life-safety-critical equipmemt designs to small companies. We had a few rooms above the River Rondezvous Bar near the Mississippi River levee. We etched our own PCBs in the bathroom.

My oldest is 1952. I think there are six other editions, in storage.

We supplied them with Telemetry, communications and Command Destruct Receivers. The company was about 200 employees.

Instincts are innate. You have them from birth. What John Larkin is talking about are inarticulate expectations built up from experiences that you don't consciously understand. You can built up false expectations from misleading experiences, and it's hard to correct them.

John Larkin has a few, and seems to be incapable of realising that he needs to correct them

To some extent, if you pay attention to all the stuff you being taught. Your tales of your time at Tulane has you paying more attention to the stuff that you thought was going to be useful.

He didn't go deeply into the theory behind the relatively simple stuff he peddled so you didn't feel out of your depth quite as often.

Very comforting, but a rather narrow education.

Is Tabby going to come out of such and exchange looking good? He 's wise to evade the challenge.

The International Space Station isn't exactly a hot-bed of microwave innovation.

If t was novel enough to be patentable they would never have risked putting it into orbit in a very expensive manned satellite.

You really don't know what you are talking about.

I was employee #5. We had over 200 when they fired me.

We made a couple of little plugin boxes, basically signal conditioners, for downlink telemetry. I designed an acoustic monitoring system for MTF, the engine test facility. NASA complained that my mic amps were motorboating, and later found they were actually picking up the mating calls of bull alligators.

He thinks electronic design is some scientific academic theoretical thing, which is why he's so bad at it.

It's actually a crearive art. H&H didn't title their book "The Science of Electronic Design."

One of my circuits is in AoE3, and my parts blaster (and resulting debris) is in the X-chapters.

They didn't. Integrated circuits revolutionised electronics. Lots of people rode that revolution to success. Don Lancaster was one of them, but he didn't create the revolution, even if he made money out of publicising it to some of the people affected by it.

Tabby seems to think that the kids that got off on Don Lancaster's over-simplifications were the only players that mattered. I got exposed to the people who pubished in the Review of Scientific Instruments and Meaurement Science and Technology who were just as marginal.

To have an effect peop,e had to buy lots of integrated circuits - enough to justify making about 100,000 of them in a batch.

John Larkin has some strange ideas, He doesn't known much about science and he knows even less about the circuits I have designed.

I'm well aware of that. You can patent good designs, which means that they aren't obvious to those skilled in the art.

There was one that I sat on for nearly twenty years - until programmable logic parts got big enough to make it practical. It wasn't worth patenting, but it did get into my 1996 paper.

I'm sure that you find that flattering.

Just because someone has a patent or many of them does not mean they are necessarily being innovative... I see patents all the time, that are just mixes of existing technology (prior art) applied to a different field, maybe.

Those patents are just excuses to sue others who may very well have come up with the same idea and implementation. That is why the USPTO says "a person having ordinary skill in the art".

If you think about it, all patents are based on "prior art" of some sort. If it uses dirt, for instance, that is prior art itself.

The US patent system is broken for the most part.

boB

Wrong. The patent system is all about rewarding innovation and persuading people to publish and share their innovations.

Innovations always look obvious after the event. One that I did get looked perfectly obvious to me, and when I got tired explaining why it was obvious I turned it into a patent query - essentially as a joke - which eventually turned into a patent.

Most patents aren't worth taking out, in the same way that 19 out of twenty start-up fail and lose all the money invested in them. It would be nice if we could do better. Somebody should invent - and patent - a better system.

says "a person having ordinary skill in the art".

They also a device which lets inventors license their clever idea to other people, so that it ends up more widely used. Cheats try to pirate the ideas, and do get sued, but that isn't what the system was invented for.

If you thought about it you wouldn't waste time posting blindingly obvious points.

Since you think that "patents are just excuses to sue others who may very well have come up with the same idea and implementation" you have a rather imperfect idea of what the patent system does and why it exists. It may well look broken to you, but if you were exposed to the bits that do work, and had the wit to grasp how they worked, you might acquire a rather more accurate idea of what it does.

Did it sound like Sloman's constant bleating?

I have designed things that were later patented. That was not obvious AFTER the patent was issued. I have seen many designs that were later patented only to waste MY time and my company's time with patent trolls trying to get money. So far, I have wont those by finding prior art.

THAT is what I am talking about. If you can't understand that, then I am not going to continue with this waste of time as you call it.

You have become a grumpy old man and I am sorry that you have some kind of complex that keeps you arguing with people and calling them names. It can't be good for your health.

boB

What was not not obvious AFTER the patent was issued? Patented ideas always look obvious after somebody has invented them.

IBM and EMI Central Research made a habit of it. they weren't exactly patent trolls but once they had set up a stable of patent lawyers, they kept them busy.

It happens.

Of course I understand it. It happens, but it isn't what the patent system was invented to achieve - and give or take quite a bit of corrupt abuse - has achieved.

I don't suffer fools gladly, but the names I call them are fairly accurate descriptions. I have been known to celebrate people who do better.

If I spent all my time being grumpy, it might be bad for my health, but I don't.