I think almost everyone has had the experience of listening to a piece of music that transports you back to some other time, place, and experience. There are several such pieces that zap my brain like that, and I occasionally discover a new one. Here are three that get me every time:
Tommy (The Who): Takes me back to 1969, when I was consumed in learning about electronics. I spent many hours in a disused chicken shack that I'd converted into an electronics workshop, building lots of home-designed projects that occasionally worked. I couldn't afford to buy parts, so I scavenged them from old vacuum tube radios and televisions that local repair shops (remember them?) gave me. I played this album repeatedly, on an old Motorola stereo (vacuum tubes and electrodynamic speakers!) that I'd scavenged and repaired...
Kodachrome (Paul Simon): Takes me back to 1973, when I was attending U.S. Navy technical schools in Mare Island (Vallejo), California. On the weekends I jumped into my old beater of a car and cruised north to Yolo County, between Davis and Dixon, to go skydiving. I drove through miles and miles of fragrant fields, windows open and hot, humid air pouring in, and this song playing loud on my cassette deck. Happy times, and this song takes me right back there...
Smoke on the Water (Deep Purple) Takes me back to 1975, when I was a few short miles off the coast of South Vietnam, in the South China Sea, as Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese forces. The USS Long Beach (which I was stationed on) was part of a task force that was picking up refugees. We had many ARVN helicopters land on our aft deck, just barely big enough to hold one of the CH-47 Chinooks they were mainly coming out in. Each time one landed, a large working party (including me!) would push it over the side to make room for the next one. While we worked, someone had this song playing in a loop, very loud. It was an eerie scene – frantic refugees (men, women, and children), laden with valuables, running around terrified; multimillion dollar helicopters being tossed over the side like garbage; even more helicopters running out of fuel and landing close alongside (sometimes very close!); and a motley assortment of overloaded boats heading for us. Every ship in the large task force was experiencing similar things; together we took back over 25,000 refugees to the Phillipines. A few notes of that song and I'm right back there in that maelstrom...
Showing posts with label Memories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Memories. Show all posts
Friday, September 6, 2013
Thursday, February 28, 2013
Changes...
Siggy was our ride on many adventures throughout the Western U.S. It took us in safety and comfort on freeways and on extremely rugged back-country roads. Perhaps the most challenging thing we ever did with Siggy was a wonderful vacation in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado (where we're going again this summer). With Debbie, my dad, and two dogs (Mo'i and Lea) we roamed all over those mountains – never meeting a trail we couldn't take, and never feeling the least at risk.
But poor Siggy is now too old and decrepit to safely take us into the back-country any more. With nearly 300,000 miles on it (with never a major repair!), the engine is now on its last legs. Replacing the engine would be quite expensive, and the rest of the vehicle is worn as well. Really the entire drive train should be replaced, and that just didn't seem practical. So last week we researched all our options and chose a new ride: a 2013 Toyota FJ Cruiser, bright orange and white. This time we're not going to keep it a stock vehicle – we bought a very basic model (just the off-roading package) and we're going to add aftermarket gear to make it a really capable and safe off-road vehicle.
I drove Siggy to the dealer (in El Cajon) to meet its fate as a trade-in. It was a sad drive; Siggy is just chock full of wonderful memories for us. I shed a few tears, and at one point almost turned around to take it back home. But what would we do with an old, beat-up LandCruiser? In the end, I decided I'd hope that somebody on a tight budget would buy Siggy and fix it all up in a labor of love. I hope that's what happens, anyway...
Thursday, February 21, 2013
Internet Jukebox...
Via my mom, this delightful site. Debbie and I spent a happy hour just listening to the songs we remember from our teenage years, and with some amusement to many of the earlier songs that we'd never heard before...
Monday, July 23, 2012
Apollo 11 in Photos...
I was nearly 17 that summer, and for the days (which seemed like months!) of the mission, I was completely consumed with it. There was no Internet back then, and the TV news only had an hour or so per day of actual content. My best source was the BBC News from London, which I picked up on a ham radio receiver. The BBC had a flock of reporters on the story, all over the world; they did an amazing job of in-depth reporting, making the American news look just plain amateur by comparison.
For me, the most tension-filled moment of the mission is the one captured in the image above: the Lunar Module's ascent and rendezvous with the Command Module in lunar orbit. Three men, a quarter million miles from home, meeting up in the unbelievable vastness of outer space. It seemed such an unlikely feat, and yet they not only pulled it off, they made it look easy.
By the way, there was a slide rule along on that mission – and it was used :-)
The Atlantic has a nice collection of Apollo 11 photos...
Saturday, June 23, 2012
Read-Only Memory...
This post at NYC Resistor, about EPROMs, set me off on a little trip down memory lane this morning...
“EPROM” stands for Eraseable, Programmable Read-Only Memory. The “ROM” part just means some memory (a place to store information) that can be read, but not written (modified, erased, etc.). However, they can be programmed one time. You could think of them as being analagous to a printed book – you can read the information in the book, but you can't actually change what's been printed on the page, once it's been printed.
This sort of memory is essential in virtually every electronics design that includes a computer, and in many other areas as well. I designed a lot of electronic gadgets that included a finite state machine, and these often included a ROM as well. EPROMs, like the 1702A (at right) and it's many descendants, were an enormous improvement over the previous forms of ROMs – you could erase and reprogram them (like being able to magically erase a printed book and replace the text with text of your choice). If you're an engineer developing a design of some sort, you might go through many cycles of design/build/test during the course of finishing a product, and the EPROM made it easy to do that.
The 1702A EPROM was the first of these I'd ever run into. I first started using it in the mid-'70s, and it was a huge improvement over previous ROM technology. The way you erased one of these EPROMs is to shine a very bright, short-wave ultraviolet light through the clear window for an hour or so. We bought specially little light-tight boxes to do this in, as the short-wave ultraviolet light is dangerous for people. When I first heard about these things, I thought the idea very odd – no other electronic device I'd ever heard of worked with UV light. But the convenience was undeniable.
Today the idea of a UV-erasable EPROM seems quite quaint. EEPROMs (Electrically-Eraseable Read-Only Memory) have completely taken over. These ROMs require That's what's in your USB memory stick, or your Solid-State Disk. The laptop I'm writing this on has a 512GB SSD – that's an EEPROM with 4,398,046,511,104 bits of information in it. The 1702A held 2,048 bits, roughly 2 billionths as much information as my laptop's SSD. But what came before EPROMs?
The first kind of ROM that I ever ran into personally was built from a matrix of capacitors made from a double-sided printed circuit board. Once side of the board had a series of parallel lines etched in one direction, while the other side had orthoganal parallel lines (at 90° direction). Each intersection of lines from the two sides represented one bit of information. To make a “1”, there was a small, square pad of copper on both sides of that intersection. These pads formed a tiny capacitor, and appropriate electronics could detect these. That first ROM I saw had 16 lines on each side of the circuit board, making 256 intersections – so it was a 256 bit (or 32 byte) ROM. It was most definitely not eraseable – nor was it programmable. The only way you could change the value of this ROM was to manufacture a new one from scratch! The electronics that “read” that ROM was roughly the size of a shoebox, and quite unreliable – I spent many hours “tuning” those darned things back in the early '70s, on U.S. Navy cryptographic equipment.
The next kind of ROM I saw was used as the “bootstrap” (a small, simple program that loaded a bigger, more complex program) for the 642-A and 642-B computers I worked on, again in the U.S. Navy in the early '70s. This ROM was made with a “plug-board” – essentially a big connector with some of the pins wired together. Each pair of pins wired together was a single “1” bit, and each pair of pins not wired together was a “0” bit. This particular ROM had 32 words of information, with each word being 30 bits long – so 960 bits all together. This was implemented with four connectors, each having 480 pins (that's a big connector!). This ROM was programmable – with a really skinny pair of pliers and a magnifying glass, you could plug or unplug wires to change bits from “1” to “0” and vice versa. Just once I had to do this, when a field modification came out. I remember that it took me several days of quite painstaking work to change the bootstrap programs for all four of the affected computers on my ship.
When I first started doing digital design work in the mid '70s, there was a kind of PROM (programmable, but not eraseable) available at fairly low cost. These were little integrated circuits (chips, or ICs) that you could program by blowing microscopic little fuses that were actually constructed of silicon on the chip. One did this with a PROM “programmer” – a little electronic gadget that you “talked” to through a serial port. These parts were readily available with up to a few thousand bits, and in the smaller sizes were fairly economical. Still, in each design/build/test cycle you'd have to throw the old one away and “burn” a new one – a process that was not only potentially expensive, but was annoyingly slow. The 1702A EPROM was an enormous improvement over that, and really quite revolutionized the way that I did my design work, as I no longer had to worry much about either the cost or the time of the ROM in a design/build/test cycle...
“EPROM” stands for Eraseable, Programmable Read-Only Memory. The “ROM” part just means some memory (a place to store information) that can be read, but not written (modified, erased, etc.). However, they can be programmed one time. You could think of them as being analagous to a printed book – you can read the information in the book, but you can't actually change what's been printed on the page, once it's been printed.
This sort of memory is essential in virtually every electronics design that includes a computer, and in many other areas as well. I designed a lot of electronic gadgets that included a finite state machine, and these often included a ROM as well. EPROMs, like the 1702A (at right) and it's many descendants, were an enormous improvement over the previous forms of ROMs – you could erase and reprogram them (like being able to magically erase a printed book and replace the text with text of your choice). If you're an engineer developing a design of some sort, you might go through many cycles of design/build/test during the course of finishing a product, and the EPROM made it easy to do that.The 1702A EPROM was the first of these I'd ever run into. I first started using it in the mid-'70s, and it was a huge improvement over previous ROM technology. The way you erased one of these EPROMs is to shine a very bright, short-wave ultraviolet light through the clear window for an hour or so. We bought specially little light-tight boxes to do this in, as the short-wave ultraviolet light is dangerous for people. When I first heard about these things, I thought the idea very odd – no other electronic device I'd ever heard of worked with UV light. But the convenience was undeniable.
Today the idea of a UV-erasable EPROM seems quite quaint. EEPROMs (Electrically-Eraseable Read-Only Memory) have completely taken over. These ROMs require That's what's in your USB memory stick, or your Solid-State Disk. The laptop I'm writing this on has a 512GB SSD – that's an EEPROM with 4,398,046,511,104 bits of information in it. The 1702A held 2,048 bits, roughly 2 billionths as much information as my laptop's SSD. But what came before EPROMs?
The first kind of ROM that I ever ran into personally was built from a matrix of capacitors made from a double-sided printed circuit board. Once side of the board had a series of parallel lines etched in one direction, while the other side had orthoganal parallel lines (at 90° direction). Each intersection of lines from the two sides represented one bit of information. To make a “1”, there was a small, square pad of copper on both sides of that intersection. These pads formed a tiny capacitor, and appropriate electronics could detect these. That first ROM I saw had 16 lines on each side of the circuit board, making 256 intersections – so it was a 256 bit (or 32 byte) ROM. It was most definitely not eraseable – nor was it programmable. The only way you could change the value of this ROM was to manufacture a new one from scratch! The electronics that “read” that ROM was roughly the size of a shoebox, and quite unreliable – I spent many hours “tuning” those darned things back in the early '70s, on U.S. Navy cryptographic equipment.
The next kind of ROM I saw was used as the “bootstrap” (a small, simple program that loaded a bigger, more complex program) for the 642-A and 642-B computers I worked on, again in the U.S. Navy in the early '70s. This ROM was made with a “plug-board” – essentially a big connector with some of the pins wired together. Each pair of pins wired together was a single “1” bit, and each pair of pins not wired together was a “0” bit. This particular ROM had 32 words of information, with each word being 30 bits long – so 960 bits all together. This was implemented with four connectors, each having 480 pins (that's a big connector!). This ROM was programmable – with a really skinny pair of pliers and a magnifying glass, you could plug or unplug wires to change bits from “1” to “0” and vice versa. Just once I had to do this, when a field modification came out. I remember that it took me several days of quite painstaking work to change the bootstrap programs for all four of the affected computers on my ship.
When I first started doing digital design work in the mid '70s, there was a kind of PROM (programmable, but not eraseable) available at fairly low cost. These were little integrated circuits (chips, or ICs) that you could program by blowing microscopic little fuses that were actually constructed of silicon on the chip. One did this with a PROM “programmer” – a little electronic gadget that you “talked” to through a serial port. These parts were readily available with up to a few thousand bits, and in the smaller sizes were fairly economical. Still, in each design/build/test cycle you'd have to throw the old one away and “burn” a new one – a process that was not only potentially expensive, but was annoyingly slow. The 1702A EPROM was an enormous improvement over that, and really quite revolutionized the way that I did my design work, as I no longer had to worry much about either the cost or the time of the ROM in a design/build/test cycle...
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Memories: a Consumer Durable...
This little article caught my eye: an economist (Garett Jones) notes that that people make decisions about their vacations in much the same way that they make decisions about durable goods (things like cars and refrigerators). But here's the part that really resonated with me: if your memories are a durable good, then you should “buy” as many of them as you can when you're young – because then you've got your whole life to enjoy them.
I never have actually thought about my memories as a consumer durable :-) However, I certainly have treated them in the way Mr. Jones recommends, and I've taken some heat for this over my life. Debbie and I have (very) freely spent on our vacations, our animals, and other cherished experiences – even when we couldn't really afford to do so. I've never regretted doing that (though I've often been criticized for it), and the main reason why – is precisely the memories Mr. Jones speaks of. We've had a great many adventures in our lives, and the memories of them (and of course the broadening experiences) are priceless to us.
As I write this, I can't help but enumerate some in my mind. The ones that jump out: walking on the rim of an active (and erupting!) volcano in Hawai'i, skydiving, scuba diving in the Philippines, our many companion animals over the years, two weeks on a motorcycle in the back country of Australia, four wheeling in the San Juan Mountains, touring through the Baltic islands of Estonia, four wheeling on Mauna Kea in Hawai'i with my parents and (separately) my mother-in-law, and exploring Costa Rica (especially Mt. Arenal and Monte Verde). Some of these adventures were almost 40 years ago – and Mr. Jones point about the time value of them is spot on...
I never have actually thought about my memories as a consumer durable :-) However, I certainly have treated them in the way Mr. Jones recommends, and I've taken some heat for this over my life. Debbie and I have (very) freely spent on our vacations, our animals, and other cherished experiences – even when we couldn't really afford to do so. I've never regretted doing that (though I've often been criticized for it), and the main reason why – is precisely the memories Mr. Jones speaks of. We've had a great many adventures in our lives, and the memories of them (and of course the broadening experiences) are priceless to us.
As I write this, I can't help but enumerate some in my mind. The ones that jump out: walking on the rim of an active (and erupting!) volcano in Hawai'i, skydiving, scuba diving in the Philippines, our many companion animals over the years, two weeks on a motorcycle in the back country of Australia, four wheeling in the San Juan Mountains, touring through the Baltic islands of Estonia, four wheeling on Mauna Kea in Hawai'i with my parents and (separately) my mother-in-law, and exploring Costa Rica (especially Mt. Arenal and Monte Verde). Some of these adventures were almost 40 years ago – and Mr. Jones point about the time value of them is spot on...
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Don Tarbell...
The very first programming I ever did for money was done for a guy named Don Tarbell. If you're old enough to remember the early, heady days of microcomputers, you'll know that name – he manufactured an S-100 board that became the gold standard of cassette tape data storage. He also made one of the first affordable floppy disk interface boards, also for the S-100 bus.
He's got a special place in my memory for a different reason, though: way back in 1976 or 1977, he published an RFQ (request for quote) for someone to write a Basic interpreter. He wanted something with better features than could be found on the then-standard Microsoft Basic, and he wanted to sell it at a low price. I answered that RFQ with an absurdly low bid (and and even more absurdly fast delivery) and absolutely nothing else to recommend me. At the time, I was still in the U.S. Navy (I didn't know it, but it was against regulations for me to engage in a contract!). I had never written any software for money before. I had no education in software engineering. I had no references. I had no samples of my work. And I had never even seen a Basic program before. Don talked with me on the phone, and ended up giving me a contract.
Later he told me that all the other quotes he'd received were 25 or more times the price I had quoted, and all the delivery times were 4 or more times what I quoted. So he figured he didn't really have much to lose by trying me out; if I failed (something he thought was a high probability), he could still go with another contractor. Well, I didn't fail – I delivered it on time, collected my hard-earned payment, and then went on to have a very good relationship with Don, delivering many enhancements over the next couple of years. That contract was the start of my career in software engineering.
Something like 15 years ago, when trying to reconnect with Don, I heard that he had committed suicide. This was shocking to me, as the Don I knew was full of life and enthusiasm, and I had trouble even imagining him being depressed enough to take his own life. After that, of course, I stopped looking for him.
Today, purely by accident I stumbled on this forum entry at the Classic Computers site:
He's got a special place in my memory for a different reason, though: way back in 1976 or 1977, he published an RFQ (request for quote) for someone to write a Basic interpreter. He wanted something with better features than could be found on the then-standard Microsoft Basic, and he wanted to sell it at a low price. I answered that RFQ with an absurdly low bid (and and even more absurdly fast delivery) and absolutely nothing else to recommend me. At the time, I was still in the U.S. Navy (I didn't know it, but it was against regulations for me to engage in a contract!). I had never written any software for money before. I had no education in software engineering. I had no references. I had no samples of my work. And I had never even seen a Basic program before. Don talked with me on the phone, and ended up giving me a contract.
Later he told me that all the other quotes he'd received were 25 or more times the price I had quoted, and all the delivery times were 4 or more times what I quoted. So he figured he didn't really have much to lose by trying me out; if I failed (something he thought was a high probability), he could still go with another contractor. Well, I didn't fail – I delivered it on time, collected my hard-earned payment, and then went on to have a very good relationship with Don, delivering many enhancements over the next couple of years. That contract was the start of my career in software engineering.
Something like 15 years ago, when trying to reconnect with Don, I heard that he had committed suicide. This was shocking to me, as the Don I knew was full of life and enthusiasm, and I had trouble even imagining him being depressed enough to take his own life. After that, of course, I stopped looking for him.
Today, purely by accident I stumbled on this forum entry at the Classic Computers site:
My name is Paula Rouse. I worked for the "Famous" Don Tarbell at Tarbell Electronics in Carson, CA from 1976 to 1983. I was his first employee when he began selling cassette interface kits and assembled units. He was a terrific boss and his wife Brenda and I have been best friends for all these years. She called me this evening to say that Don passed away this morning, May 19th, 1998, after a long bout with cancer. I was on the internet tonight, looking for information on old friends who used to come into the shop, hoping to contact them to let them know of his passing. When I typed Don's name into Yahoo's search engine, your page came up. It is not dated, so I do not know when you tried to contact him by e-mail, but Brenda said that he had not been checking his e-mail but once every two or three weeks since he had been so sick. That may be the reason for your not receiving a reply. He was a great guy and he will be sorely missed. It was so much fun being a part of the early years of computing. He was instrumental in shaping my career and there are many good memories of the times spent together.It's still sad to know that Don has passed away, but somehow I feel ever so much better that it was cancer that took him, and not suicide.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)