Learning Electronics
I am always asked, and in my talks I explain how I got into electronics and computers. My maternal grandfather, Jimmy, who I was named after, had a TV and Radio store when I was a kid. On the weekends when the store was closed my mom would help him with the books and paperwork, while he repaired peoples things in the back. To keep a 6 year old entertained he would put a junk set on the bench and give me a few tools and let me tear it apart. For me this was heaven. I have taken things apart to see why they work my whole life because of this.
On a side note, when the Star Trek movie Wrath of Khan came out and Capt. Kirk has the line “Sometimes it pays to know WHY things work on a Starship.” It’s one of my favorite lines to this day.
One day he noticed that I had cut all the resistors out of this one radio and lined them up in ascending order. Now, in order to do this you have to read the color bars on a resistor to know its value. He had a poster on the wall with the color chart on it. I had figured that out all on my own. He was so impressed that he started to teach me about electronics right then and there.
Later he obtained an old Hallicrafters S-38 short wave radio that needed fixing. Then he and I went through the radio and got it working again. That was my first radio. He also started to teach me about Amateur Radio, and helped me get my first license which I got the day I was old enough. I still have that license to this day. It is tradition that when you rise up through the ranks of Amateur or Ham radio, you get to shorten your call sign by one letter for each level you progress. My grandfather for some reason preferred to keep the original six character license, and I have honored that. My call sign is KA5HXV and always has been. If you are a Ham, I hope to hear you on the air one day!
Time moved on and my grandfather passed away in 1968 right about the time that the Hemisfair Worlds Fair came to town. He had bought tickets way in advance and we were excited to see the newest things in electronics. It was bittersweet going to the fair without him. But I did get to see the newest things and got an introduction to early computers. I can only imagine the things he and I would have done had he stayed around.
Then in the mid 1970’s the magazine Popular Electronics ran a series of articles on how You Too could build your own computer! I knew they were talking to me and I did just that. I bought perf-board, chips and wire then proceeded to build the COSMAC ELF 1802 computer. The microprocessor was new and was 4 bits wide. For reference todays computers are all 8 or 16 bits wide or more. It also had 4K or 4096 bytes of memory. To put that into perspective you can get roughly 5800 characters on a typical 8.5 by 11 inch piece of paper. Looks small doesn’t it? That is how much memory my first computer had.
There was no monitor, no keyboard, just 10 little switches and 10 LED lights. That’s it.
But it allowed me learn about computers at the lowest level. All computes today boil down to a series of one’s and zero’s at the lowest level. If you keep that in mind they all become easier to understand.
I don’t know how he did it, but my grandfather instilled curiosity in me. I have had the desire to learn about any new technology or gadget when I come across it. Because of this thirst for knowledge I discovered a latin phrase that is attributed to Michelangelo. It is Ancora Imparo which basically translates to Forever Learning. My friends know this about me and over the years I have gotten gifts of signs, coffee cups and t-shirts with Ancora Imparo on them.
For more on this era in my life, see the story about my first job in computers