Jedi Masters of Electronics

Scan of BSEE Thesis...

...Jim Thompson

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

That letter at the end about how the thing actually works is very cool...

You should have stuck with your usual stone tablets and a chisel. They don't yellow. ;-)

FIVE years later, Dr. Gorlin was in Scottsdale for a conference, called me and told me it had been used on humans! (Initial trials were with laboratory animals.)

Don't know whether anyone has noticed yet or not... transistors are Germanium... so the circuitry is chopper-stabilized ;-)

...Jim Thompson

The stuff I make gets used here...

What do you make?

John

stimulus

In article , snipped-for-privacy@InfiniteSeries.Org says...>

Vibrators?

Takes coffee orders for engineers.

John

learn

And now the big dodge. See below.

But you just said that you could. Funny reaction when called to do it.

Or maybe it really does depend on the student more that you wish to admit.

Mit der Dummheit kaempfen Goetter selbst vergebens. --Schiller (from "Die Jungfrau von Orleans")

learn

learn

Who the hell are you?

Nobody is going to take a short, fat, clumsy kid and make him into an NBA star. He could certainly be made better than he is, but that may not be very good.

And I'm certainly not going to volunteer to educate JKK's rejects.

Of course. It takes talent to be good at anything, and most people, including most ee grads, just don't have the aptitude to be good design engineers. But I have taken a lot of talented people and taught them a lot, made them into good engineers, which was my point. My other point is that, talent or not, nobody is going to get very good at modern electrronics by just teaching themselves.

Nobody is going to give a newbie a serious design assignment, and he'd flub it if they did. Without working on serious stuff, said newbie will never have a clue of what's involved or what's possible. Ergo, he's going to have to work with people who already know how to play the game if he's ever going to be good. You won't get very good at tennis, either, if you just teach yourself.

What are you designing now? Did you teach yourself to be a design engineer?

John

I suspect Faraday, Steinmetz, and Tesla were the last to "teach themselves". Certainly not Edison (he simply tried lots of stuff until something "sort of" worked) or Bell. Modern day? Perhaps Widlar, Kilby, Noyce, Moore, and a few others. Even the big 3 who did the transistor (BBS) had a lot of folks to turn to for help.

ANy others?

Jim

If by 'self taught' you mean 'inventing it from scratch', then it's probably true that they're extinct, simply because it would be a contradiction--someone smart enough to invent a field solo, who wasn't smart enough to use Google, or libraries, or course work.

On the other hand, if you mean 'picked it up as a youth, unassisted except for books, articles, and blowing up stuff' then there are some of us left--and I'm certainly not the only regular poster here who meets that description.

I've never had an engineering circuits course, but I got a soldering iron for my tenth birthday (and some plumber's bar solder to go with it--my folks were not very savvy about that stuff--bless them). ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

The only transistor circuit design course I ever had was how to bias Germanium transistors to avoid thermal runaway ;-)

...Jim Thompson

"Jim Thompson" schreef in bericht news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Jim-out-of-touch-with-reality-Thompson confirms his status once again.

Yet another totally retarded remark by the totally retarded remark retard.

I learned most of my electronics while I was getting my Ph.D. thesis, from books and articles. I even bought myself a copy of Laurence G. Cowles' book, "Transistor circuits and applications" which was immensely useful.

I did quite a bit more as a post-doc in Southampton, UK then got a job as an electronic engineer at Kent Instruments in Luton - it's a miserable town and they were desperate - and learned a lot in the next couple of years - enough to move on from there to EMI's Central Research Labs in West London where I had a lot of fun and got a couple of patents.

The word "invent" has nothing to do with "from scratch".

I did "The Tunnel Diode Slideback Sampling Oscilloscope" and won some sort of award, which meant I had to present the thing again before the local IEEE chapter, mostly a bunch of power-company old farts who had no clue.

Glad that's all over.

John