Electronics Career Game Changers

I used that exact tool back in university days. It was a blessing!

That said, I am glad today we have better tools! :D

Thanks for sharing that.  I bet a lot of us take switching power supplies for granted.  It's good to hear about earlier challenges.  It reminds us that the tools and technologies we access to today weren't always around.

Yes, CPLD/FPGAs was a huge step forward. I used a large CPLD to handle banks of RAM in a high speed DSP based data collection system. It made the development process easy as I simply reprogram the CPLD instead of cuts and jumpers to make changes including timing. I was even able to embedded data conversion into the data path so I could convert TI floating point into a IEEE standard inline on transfers to the PC.

I had a similar experience - a mobile computer running off vehicle power in the late 70's. The power supplies were a non-trivial design exercise.

Magazine publications made it cool to be a geek.

What got me started in electronics was an old Philips EL3527 tape recorder. I learnt a lot from that machine mainly because I could not afford to pay anybody to repair it for me. More tape recorders followed and a few transistor radios. Then I left home to go to college, on a small grant. It was enough to enable me to buy componenets as well as eat and drink. I became an Amateur Radio Operator and learned lots about RF, tuned circuits, etc. Names like Liner 2, Pye Rocketphones, and Trio 2300 still ring bells.

Then along came the BBC Microcomputer. What a machine! A friend and I made it demodulate Packet Radio signals and display the results on the screen. With the arrival of 'Elite' I felt forced to use an X-Y analogue joystick to control the Cobra; this was done using a PIC chip and Assembler to convert the analogue voltages to mouse-like pulses; it worked beautifully both on Elite and Chocks Away. I also used the User Port to decode hand-generated Morse code from a key at up to 25WPM.

Meanwhile at work, Accounts were trying to get us electronics engineers to use early PC's for machine monitoring purposes. Those of us with Beebs and Atoms (and yes, Nascom 2's, Superboards, and UK101's) soon came to the conclusion that it was far too slow fro such things and the necessary disk drives to speed it up a bit were massively expensive. And the PC was the only one with a monochrome display. Verdict: Pathetic.

All great fun, sometimes I wish I was back there. But I'm retired now with a modern-ish PC for everyday tasks, an Acorn RISC-PC for when I want quick and dirty solutions, and several Raspberry Pi's. The Weller TCP and PU1D soldering iron and power supply still get used but my hands aren't as steady as they were.

The price difference makes it a no contest....

My favorite was simply called "Electronics". I also read every issue of Byte.

In my collection of oscilloscopes, the Tek 7704 is my favorite. I looked for all the documentation I could when I bought it. I found it very interesting that in 1971, Tek released a TekScope scope that discusses this new "high-efficiency [switching] power supply design." (pdf page 13) Also, it is only 70% efficient. It's still better than a linear, though.

I'm not sure if it was that article or the service manual that had a comment that caught my attention. It explained that the supply had a long enough power cable to remove the supply from the mainframe for testing... because switch mode supplies were such a new thing.

For me, it was a strange context to see switch mode supplies get so much care and attention. (I'm young enough that they weren't remotely new by the time I was in school.)

I'll reply as someone whose careen was at least electronics-adjacent.

As a kid, I grew up with vacuum tubes, and learned everything I could about them. Analogue domain (radios, amplifiers) etc. Transisters existed (mostly germanium) but were expensive. ICs were passives only - mainly encapsulations (big) to reduce production costs and often had tube type connectors. I still remember learning concepts like thermionic emission, and the advantages of pentodes over triodes for noise/distortion.

By the time I was graduating high school, 7400 series was in full vogue and the 8080 had come out. I still remember Pop Tronics with their Altair on the cover, and I lusted after one, but didn't have any money. Computers I had been exposed to in high school were all programmed with punched cards. Though students mostly couldn't afford, e.g., calculators we did all learn to use "slip-sticks".

In college digital electronics was all 7400 series work, with learning concepts like Carnot diagrams and NAND gate reduction (you can build everything from NAND). We had to build a modem in lab as I recall. On my own I got a surplus hall-effect keyboard and built an ASCII interface to it as I could use the electronics shops after hours. On the computing side, cards had been replaced (mostly) by printing terminals and dumb video. Editors were for the most part still line-oriented (as if one was working with a deck of cards) though TECO had some more advanced search/replace facilities. EMACS was just getting started and I admit to have mostly stuck with TECO (emacs aka control-R mode was an option). Computing for students was mostly PDP-11 or PDP-10 based, thought there was a honeywell machine running MULTICS, I preferred the AI lab's ITS OS running on a PDP10. They also had a xerox laser printer which was very cool for turning in class assignments over the typewriter in my dorm room. On my own I had wire-wrapped a Z80 S-100 system as programmed it in machine language. College was also my first exposure to programmable calculators which were very useful in most of my classes.

My first couple jobs were steps backward in that I worked as programmer on business computers (e.g. database), using line-oriented editors. .The first in COBOL (an internship), the second in HP-1000 assembly language. However the second job then entailed working on 6800 embedded controllers for large fiche retrival machines (these were interfaces to the HP1000 so you'd use the database to index the fiche and the machine would retrieve it). Most of the fiche systems we sold were for engineering systems designs (e.g. to GE), personnel records (Marine Corps) or legal cases (court systems).

Next I moved on to a job mostly working with the VAX under UNIX, doing OS work to build high availability systems for the phone companies. Interestingly enough I was hired to work on 68000 embedded processors but that kind of disappeared a few weeks after I was hired. Instead they started to build 68000 based computer systems so they had me work on that instead. This did involve a lot of work on optimization and interface to disk drive firmware and I had to work with scopes and in-circuit tools to debug so still pretty hardware oriented. Our company then built the Tahoe (a Vax clone) so one task was to port Unix to run on it, another was to create a hierarchical transaction processing system on top of that so operators could have guarantees updates would not be inconsistent and  in case of any single point failure (including to their own session terminal) recovery would be automatic (e.g. they could log into a different terminal and recover their session, single disks could fail, single processors, etc.). This was actually optimized for availability rather than fault-tolerance, but a large amount of fault-tolerance came along for the ride. Equally important was that our groups work fed back to the hardware group to improve reliability on critical components - some things could fail and be easily worked around and some things could not be. It also was the entry into a longer term interest on what you might call "intelligent scheduling" - i.e. how to monitor performance and change the job mix to achieve system-level goals rather than just process-level.

After that I went back to grad school to learn something mostly different (e.g. AI), so I'll stop there (though it did eventually lead to some work in robotics). The summary of events, then:

Punched cards -> terminals. (and batch -> time-sharing).

Line editing -> character editing.

Tubes -> ICs.

Mix of hardware and software into firmware.

Standardized OSs.

Improved reliability of systems through better hardware and software.