Then you probably had one of these. Not really the good old days.
View attachment 233113

This was my Engineering workplace in the 70's.

I built mine using the reference books and circuit ideas from the old Kilobaud magazine.

4205Brochure_Sept1986.pdf (vintagetek.org)

 

Cigarettes and coffee, lot of cigarettes and coffee.

 

it was part of our lives, ingrained into us... we built the matrix...

* * * *

ak

 

A conversation about "back in the day" ...

Young guy: No computers, no cell phones, no *internet* - what did you guys DO?

Old guy: We invented them.

 

I built mine using the reference books and circuit ideas from the old Kilobaud magazine.

Kilobaud was the magazine for homebrew micro computing. It's where Bill Gates published his infamous open letter about software "piracy".

Then, there was Dr. Dobb's Journal, "running light without overbyte".

 

Yep Im one of the old uns.

Offices were very different,
obviously no computer per desk, if you were lucky you had an on site computer, we had a PDP-8 then a -11,
Fortran or COBOL were the language of choice,

Hardware was simpler.
We did not worry about ESD, apart from those funny CMOS parts that came along ,
DTL and even the TTL was very resilient

Im certain the Permanente fog of smokers counter acted static, or it could be that as we are in the UK, and air con was un heard of, the air was always damp !

Data,
You must remember that in the 70's a 16 bit counter in a 14 pin package running at 120 MHz max was cutting edge,
when processors came long , they were by modern standards very simple.

Also it was all new, so the data we needed was relatively small, and the amount of support as it was all new was high.

Data books were the thing,
there was lots of data around, and lots of application examples and support, things were a lot less cut throat money wise.
People like Ti and Motorola were still living on the great support of the US military / NASA, where they would get orders for 10's of thousands of parts, just so they were made. They would not all be used, and the companies could then sell them again !

also remember things like slide rules were still used, it was only a few years before that calculators had become common,
My first calculator had Nixi tubes, and if I was lucky a charge would last 4 or 5 hours.

I do not know how new entrants to engineering learn,
there just seems to be so much now to learn, and if I had not a sound background to base new bits on I would be swamped.

I guess thats why people now are more specialised,
I learn digital, microwave rf, slower analogue, as well as programming

Oh they were the days,

 

The Good Old Days were before ebay so all the parts I bought locally from a real electronic parts distributor worked perfectly.
I had two pretty young draftsladies copying my hand-done schematics and their copies were blueprints.

 

Kilobaud was the magazine for homebrew micro computing. It's where Bill Gates published his infamous open letter about software "piracy".

Then, there was Dr. Dobb's Journal, "running light without overbyte".

I had forgotten about Kilobaud... I _still_ have a few years worth of Dr. Dobb's and BYTE magazine.

 

The Good Old Days were before ebay so all the parts I bought locally from a real electronic parts distributor worked perfectly.
I had two pretty young draftsladies copying my hand-done schematics and their copies were blueprints.

... and things were *so* expensive back then. And yes- you'd hand reports into the secretarial pool and they'd type it up- took 2 weeks to get something back that you can do in 2 hours on with a PC. Rooms filled with cases of tractor-paper, and the drone of dot-matrix printing constantly. Frequently checking to make sure the stack hadn't gone awry.

 

I had forgotten about Kilobaud... I _still_ have a few years worth of Dr. Dobb's and BYTE magazine.

My first feature article was a Byte cover story in the 90s. I used to work with Jerry Pournelle and all those folks.

 

Yep Im one of the old uns.

Offices were very different,
obviously no computer per desk, if you were lucky you had an on site computer, we had a PDP-8 then a -11,
Fortran or COBOL were the language of choice,

Hardware was simpler.
We did not worry about ESD, apart from those funny CMOS parts that came along ,
DTL and even the TTL was very resilient

Im certain the Permanente fog of smokers counter acted static, or it could be that as we are in the UK, and air con was un heard of, the air was always damp !

Data,
You must remember that in the 70's a 16 bit counter in a 14 pin package running at 120 MHz max was cutting edge,
when processors came long , they were by modern standards very simple.

Also it was all new, so the data we needed was relatively small, and the amount of support as it was all new was high.

Data books were the thing,
there was lots of data around, and lots of application examples and support, things were a lot less cut throat money wise.
People like Ti and Motorola were still living on the great support of the US military / NASA, where they would get orders for 10's of thousands of parts, just so they were made. They would not all be used, and the companies could then sell them again !

also remember things like slide rules were still used, it was only a few years before that calculators had become common,
My first calculator had Nixi tubes, and if I was lucky a charge would last 4 or 5 hours.

I do not know how new entrants to engineering learn,
there just seems to be so much now to learn, and if I had not a sound background to base new bits on I would be swamped.

I guess thats why people now are more specialised,
I learn digital, microwave rf, slower analogue, as well as programming

Oh they were the days,

Your point about learning is well taken- One of the things that few people realize has happened over the last 40 years, is that the older generations rode the knowledge curve up. People today, across many different disciplines, start at zero and have to climb that curve to gain competency- and this is why so few people today actually ever achieve guru status (in any given technical discipline)- Few people are able to a) get enough information to learn it all from, and b) climb that distance before they burn out.