fast divider?

Using a broad-band transistor in a classic circuit can give you a much shorter pulse. Broad-band transistors aren't all that cheap, and there aren't as many of them around as there used to be, but it can be a useful option.

You really don't want to. They have a nasty habit of doing something unexpected at inconvenient moments.

There was an ECL monostable that did a lot better. Sadly, it has gone obsolete. I did use it from time to time.

But they can give you a circuit that works, without messing up the rest of the assembly. Hunting for radio-frequency interference and stopping it getting at sensitive devices isn't all that enjoyable, and getting rid of it at source can be very attractive.

That's not a nasty habit, it's a talent that I practice and teach. Given an enormous space of undiscovered ideas, one profits from a method of exploring them in parallel with minimal filtering.

But inconvenient to who? Certainly not to me. Inventing things is fun and profitable.

It is an interesting question: does one understand then invent, or invent and then understand? Great scientific and practical ideas seem to be mostly invent or discover first, understand after.

The Plutonium book is full of examples.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

That's a really nasty habit. Encouraging people to build circuits that can go wrong when they run into a situation that the designer hadn't expected is - to put it kindly - unwise.

But one you have "discovered" your original idea, you do need to explore it's ramifications in detail, and thoroughly understand how it works.

Sometimes. Getting a patent is an expensive process, as you'd know if you'd ever been involved, and it rarely pays off. When it does it can can pay off generously, but that doesn't happen often.

It can work both ways. One of my patents struck me as obvious, but I had to explain why it was obvious so often that I wrote it up a patent query to get out from under. I was a bit surprised when it ended up as patent. My father's 25 patents were all about stuff that he understood remarkably clearly, but other people hadn't noticed

It makes better stories than the tedious reality.

Invention is precisely running into - running toward - the unexpected. Sometimes that's accidental, but can be deliberately provoked. Inventing needs the right skills and personality but improves with practice in the right environment. Books have been written about that.

Some people invent things. Some intelligent and (over)educated people actively resent invention, because they can't do it.

Understanding how it works is helpful but not mandatory. It is prudent to do the grunt work to make it economic and reliable; theory and understanding and simulation can help with those.

In the big picture, we never really understand how anything works.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

That's a bizarre way of looking at it. It's doing something in a way that hasn't been done before, but it is goal directed, and you wouldn't start the process if you didn't have a pretty clear idea of what you wanted to do, if not exactly how you were going to do it.

None of them useful enough to have been touted at places that encouraged inventions and applying for patents. EMI Central Research was just such a place, and I worked there for three years without ever running into such a book. The histories of Bell Labs

didn't mention any such book either. People will write books with the flimsiest of justifications if they think the product will sell. Teaching people how to make genuine inventions would be a very good thing if you could do it, and a lot of confidence tricksters claim that they can. The evidence supporting such claims doesn't seem to exist.

I can't say that I've met any of them. My father and two of my friends have each got their names onto about 25 patents and none of them ever talked about people resenting that work.

At EMI Central Research we were encourage to submit patent queries. One of my colleagues put in a record number of patent queries - about fifty in one year - and was seen as having rather poor judgement. None of them turned into a patent. He would have benefited from better filtering.

It strikes me as absolutely essential.

Not so much prudent as essential.

You may not be able to manage that. Other people seem to do better.

I strongly disagree; that is backwards. Sometimes we imagine products or circuits that nobody ever wanted or expected. It just happens sometimes at 2AM.

I have a folder full of ideas, most speculative and unexpected and probably dumb. We hire smart kids, college students, to explore them and write up a report on the possible uses, competitors specs and pricing, any interesting offshoots that occurr to them. They get a fixed fee when they turn in the report.

I have that one; good book.

Someone said that all the great inventions at Bell in those days were done by people who ate lunch with Harry Nyquist.

The real evidence is purchase orders.

The real evidence is purchase orders.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

And very few of them look sensible after the sun has come up.

If you knew a bit more, it would be a much thinner folder.

An expensive self-indulgence.

People don't give you purchase orders for patents. They buy products. A good and patentable idea can be central to a product, but inept development can wreck the best of ideas. The Lintech electron beam tester was based on a patented idea of their boss, whose name was on the patent (which he'd got to own). He cheap-skated on the development to such an extent that one of his ex-engineers was able to build a pretty much identical machine which destroyed his business - nobody ordered a Lintech machine after the Schlumberger competitor hit the market, and after Lintech had delivered the last of the machine it had sold they went bankrupt. Mike Engelhart - of LTSpice fame - worked on that project.

It seems to be the only evidence you can understand. You seem to have got your name on exactly one patent, taken out by a group you were working with, so your grasp of what constitutes a patentable idea and what you can do with it does seem to be second hand.

Most are obviously goofy. Many have already been invented and are on the market. There are still lots that might become products.

So the next step is to research what's out there. Lately we hire a bright college student to research the science, technology, competitors, market. They deliver a report for $1000.

One unstated benefit is that we get to evaluate the kids, even if the technology idea was silly. And it's fun.

It would be thicker.

Super cheap, compared to the alternates, like hiring a usually-fatheaded marketing manager.

Exactly. Patents are "An expensive self-indulgence."

Why the obsession with patents?

Only a small fraction of patents become commercial successes. Most are abandoned in the expensive process before they are issued, and then most issued patents are abandoned because of the maintenance fees.

Expensive vanity, mostly. OK if you are a big drug company maybe.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Not a particularly plausible claim.

Bright college students don't know all that much. They can learn, but their point of view is shaped by an education system that tells them what to think, and that does tend to concentrate on area that are easy to teach.

It will tell you quite a bit about the kids.

Dream on.

The usual term is market research organisation. Marketing manager look after the people who talk to the customers - Tom Peters thought that that ought to include the engineers but marketing managers don't feel that they can control what the engineers tell the customers.

They can be. But they were invented to let people publish and sell their trade secrets, and it is a system that does make sense if you use it sensibly.

It's the same idea as scientists exploit when they publish their results in peer-reviewed journal. You create a free market for good ideas.

All true. The Lintech patent was taken out by Cambridge Instruments and abandoned when the parent company went bust. The graduate student half of the two named inventors took over the patent by paying the maintenance fees. It was a wise move, and would have paid off even better if he'd paid more attention the people who ended up using the machines rather than to the bosses who bought them.

It's like venture capitalism - 19 out of 20 patents weren't worth taking out, but the twentieth paid for all the rest. EMI, RCA and IBM all patented everything they could. The big drug companies have the same business model.

We have recently got two excellent reports on technology, specs, competitors, pricing. Two more in process look good. I was surprised how well this is working.

Dream? Yes!

Engineers are the best choice to talk to customers.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Perhaps, but they do need to devote most of their time to engineering.