My Interests

PAST ELECTRONIC INTERESTS:

I have always, even as a child, been interested in how things worked and how
they were put together.  When I was three years old someone brought me a big
red plastic fire truck which actually squirted water through the fire hose.
Before the person who had brought the present left, I had the fire truck all
taken apart.  My dad could not figure out how to get all the pieces back
together, and my parents were really angry!

I know that as a kid, the site of a soda machine taken apart intrigued me.
What was inside there?  What made it work?  I used to find old radios lying
in prairies and would examine their insides.  I would open up the capacitors
and find nothing inside other than something like tin foil.  Where was the
magic?  I would take apart alarm clocks and examine the gears.  Whenever I
would get something new, I would look forward to the day when I could take
it all apart - this drove my parents crazy!

When I grew to be a teenager, my interests became more directed towards
electronics.  Absorbed in science fiction programs on TV, I attempted to
construct a control system which consisted of a master control and auxiliary
control.  Master control could override auxiliary control, and there was a
way for auxiliary control to override master control if you knew how to do
it.  This all revolved around a canister-type vacuum cleaner on wheels which
would roll across our basement floor. My dad thought it sounded like a jet
airplane, especially with the system I had invented for gradually increasing
the speed of the 660-watt motor. This was great fun when friends came to
visit, and I constantly found ways to re-wire and revise the system.  At the
time I was around 15 years old and did not have access to a camera or
computer to document this.  I did, however, have access to a typewriter and
hope to update these documents to computer format.  When I have this
available online, you can click here to see it.

During my later high-school years I began to collect and disassemble broken
televisions and radios.  I also collected old training manuals concerning
TV/radio repair and broadcast signal standards.  In my junior year of high
school, I built a 5-tube AM radio receiver.  By the time I graduated from
high school, I was repairing radios and TVs in my basement workshop.
Click on these pictures to see a larger version:

__

This basement workshop and the test equipment are now just fond memories of
an obsolete era of my life.  I thought that I could build a better mousetrap
and make my fortune as an inventor.  Most of my time was spent repairing
radios, TVs, and stereos for relatives, coworkers, etc.

__

There was one little project which I built during this time which was
somewhat revolutionary, and represented the height of my achievements in
this area.  I designed a multi-purpose box which controlled my basement
workshop.  These are the functions which it performed:

**  It monitored the phone line and if it detected an incoming call would
use a ringing generator to ring "illegal" extension phones.  This was back
in the 1970's and I was told that Illinois Bell would measure the ringing
current to detect if there were any unauthorized extension phones on the
line.  My box would monitor the phone line through a 1,000,000 ohm resistor
so the current drain was minimal.
**  It monitored the lighting in the area using a photocell to determine if
someone was there.  If the fluorescent lights were on in my workshop and
there was a power failure, it would use a battery backup to start an
overhead 12-volt fluorescent light so I would not be left in the dark.
**  Using another photocell it also monitored the light by the stairway
leading down into the basement.  If someone stood at the top of the stairs
and turned the south basement light on, off, on, and off again it would
light the stairs for a predetermined number of seconds to give the person
time to get down to the workshop.  This was useful because my mother and I
would "live" in the workshop area and once you got downstairs there was no
way to turn the basement light off since the switch was at the top of the
stairs.  My mother requested this feature so we could save money on our
electric bill.
**  If a special button was pushed on the control panel it would light the
stairs so someone could go back upstairs.
**  There was a hold circuit such that someone could be put on hold in my
bedroom or in the basement workshop and taken off hold in the destination
location.  There was a hold switch and indicator on the main control panel,
and a switch and indicator on a smaller control panel in my bedroom.

This little box also had some special design features:

**  All main circuitry was implemented on plug-in circuit cards.  These
cards could be removed for easy troubleshoot and repair.  The most critical
circuit board had a spare copy made to act as a backup.
**  When the case was closed, all adjustment circuitry was still accessible
from the outside of the case through the ventilation holes.
**  All interconnections were through double banana plugs on the back of the
unit.

There was also an eight-ampere power supply with battery backup which was
used to power this and the stereo system in my basement workshop.  It was
constant and variable-voltage outputs.

UNFORTUNATELY, so much of me went into this project that I could not throw
it away when it was no longer being used.  Since I still have the pieces of
the project and the plans which I used when I created it, I should be able
to digitize all this.  Maybe then I will be able to destroy these memories
of the past and finally let go of that which I can't admit I have lost.

Here are the plans.
Here is the control panel.
Here is the power supply.

PAST COMPUTER INTERESTS:

When I was in high school and people saw what I was interested in and how my
mind worked, they said I should be a computer programmer.  I did not see
that as the real challenge.  I thought that I would design and build
computers, and instead pursued a career in electronics.  Besides, computers
in the 1970's were programmed through key punch machines and Hollerith cards
- hardly fun!

My first memory of being really interested in having my own computer was in
the late 1970's.  People were starting to build home computers, and I
remember playing with a Teletype machine at work and storing messages on
paper tape.  Click here to see an example of a Teletype paper tape message from that
period.

As my career in electronics progressed, I realized that although I could
build things using my skills, the real magic was in the programming which
made it work.  I always thought that I would build my first computer, and
spent countless hours studying microprocessor data sheets, memory chip
timing diagrams, and looking briefly at Assembler language and compilers.
Eventually, I decided that it would be better to buy a computer and see if I
enjoyed working with it before committing to a huge project.

My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20 which I bought for $80 at K-mart in
the early 1980's.  At first, I didn't have the cassette backup unit, and had
to manually type BASIC programs into the machine every time I wanted to run
them.  My parents bought me the cassette unit for my birthday.  The machine
came with 4KB of memory built-in.  At a later date I bought the 16KB memory
add-on for $100.  With 20K of RAM, I thought I was set!  When I bought the
VIC-20 I already owned a Teletype machine.  I constructed an RS-232 to 20ma
current loop interface using opto-isolators so I could use the Teletype as a
printer.  Eventually, I purchased a used Heathkit dot matrix printer to use
with the VIC-20.

My next computer - and my first "real" computer - was a Kaypro II.  It ran
the CPM operating system which was a standard at the time.  It had 64K of
RAM (how could I ever need more?), two 200K floppy drives, a built-in
monitor and keyboard, a printer port and a serial port.  I remember being at
the computer store where I had bought it - the salesman thought it was so
complicated, and wanted to tell me how to use it.  I had already looked at
the manuals, and thought it was a cinch.  I interrupted his talk about how
to use the machine and said "What I need to know is how to input saved
programs on paper tape from a Teletype machine into the Kaypro."  He
stopped, gave me a totally blank look, and told me he had no idea what I was
talking about.  He realized that I was way ahead of his little tutorial.  I
later discovered that I could give the Kaypro a command to switch the system
console out to the Teletype which allowed me to feed the paper tape into the
Teletype after using the keyboard to enter the BASIC program - the Kaypro
just thought it was the world's fastest BASIC programmer.

I used the Kaypro for quite a number of years, and I have fond memories of
all that it taught me concerning telecommunications, programming, word
processing, spreadsheets, etc.  Eventually, as I neared the end of the
1980's, I realized that the world was being taken over by the IBM PC.  For
years I admired them from afar, but they were way out of my reach
financially.  When I bought the Kaypro, all the hardware and all the
software was $1500.  Buying the IBM with the hardware only was $3500!!
Around 1988 I managed to buy a used IBM PC (not an XT).

One of my first challenges was to get my programs working on this new
operating system.  After all, this was not CPM, it was PC-DOS.  For
instance, I had a program which I had written in COBOL.  When I converted to
the IBM PC, I wanted to make it work in some language which was easy to use
on that machine.  As I recall, I re-wrote the program in BASIC and when I
could not get it to work, re-wrote it yet again in Pascal.  The Pascal
version worked fine.  Another example of a program which I used extensively
was one which I created to allow me to change, test, and reset printing
parameters on my Epson RX-100.  I never really finished the program as I
originally designed it, but the functionality it provided was very useful.

I immediately sunk hundreds of dollars into the IBM PC to buy extra memory
and interface cards.  By constantly updating this machine I learned a great deal
about computer hardware, although it was a very expensive lesson.
Eventually I had replaced everything in the machine except for the
motherboard.  I could not afford a new computer, so someone convinced me
that replacing the motherboard was not a big deal.  In 1990 I bought a book
to guide me through the intricacies of the process and bought an 80386SX
20MHz motherboard for $300.  At that point, I had replaced everything in the
case and was able to build a computer from scratch.  Over the next few years
I continued learning more and building computers, eventually becoming a
network administrator.

__