Most of the time, I meander (some may say "blunder") my merry way through life without realizing how old I’ve become, until something happens to make me think about days gone by.
For example, a couple of months ago, the folks at Hackster.io asked me to write a series of Throwback Thursdays columns. The idea is to talk about the way things were when I was growing up in the 1960s. The main focus is on technology, but I also plan to touch on other topics where there has been a significant transition from then to now.
Writing these columns has prompted me to recall various things, such as the fact that the first fridge my parents purchased was powered by the same coal gas used to fuel the cooking stove.
One by-product of this was that our fridge was delivered and installed by the local gas board. Another was that it kept our kitchen toasty warm.
The following is a list of all the Throwback Thursdays columns I’ve posted thus far (not surprisingly, given the name, a new column is presented every Thursday).
Bodacious Wooden Breadboards: Have you ever wondered where the " bread" and "board" parts of "breadboard" come from? All is revealed in this column.
Springing Into Action with Spring Connectors: In which we take a nostalgic look at how spring terminals made learning electronics easy, fun, and gloriously solder-free.
Vunderful Vacuum Tubes: From radio days to steampunk displays — long live the thermionic valve!
Not-so BASIC: Many of today’s older engineers and computer gurus “cut their teeth” on the BASIC programming language.
Holy Sizzling Soldering Irons, Batman: My first soldering iron was a traditional copper bit device, which I heated over a ring on my mum’s gas cooking stove in our kitchen.
Radical Retro Cans: From phonautographs to funky “cans." Exploring the quirky history, technology, and timeless style of retro headphones.
Eclectic Electronic Emporiums: Let’s take a nostalgic romp through the dusty stores of yore, fossicking for forgotten treasures and techno-mystical wonders.
The Sounds of Yesteryear (Part 1): From groovy grooves to whispering wires, marvel at mankind’s marvelous methods of making musical memories.
The Sounds of Yesteryear (Part 2): From shellac to 8-track: A joyride through the golden age of analog audio formats.
Magical Monthly Magazines: A nostalgic look back at the monthly magazines of yesteryear that inspired generations of tinkerers.
Toasty Fridges and Frosty Frozen Peas: From gas-powered chillers to pint-sized freezers, a frosty tale of peas, puddles, and progress.
I’ve got a lot of ideas floating around in my head (that’s the best place to have ideas, in my experience), but I’d be really interested to hear if you have any suggestions for future Throwback Thursdays offerings.
I earned a master’s degree in physics at Dartmouth College 1971-1973, at the peak of Dartmouth TimeSharing System. their BASIC was a compiler on a G.E. mainframe computer equipped with hard-disk drives. DTSS BASIC was part of a text-only integrated development environment accessed via mostly Model 33Teletype printer machines. I later found that my DTSS BASIC programs were incompatible with microcomputer BASIC interpreters for machines that lacked hard disks.
It must have been amazing to have attended Dartmouth College in those days when technologies were in flux (more-so than usual)
I learned electronics as a boy by building radios. At Dartmouth, the EE department had nothing to teach me, as the microcomputer revolution was in the future. DTSS was built in the mathematics department. The Intel 8008 was introduced in 1972. I recall the 1972 Intel MCS-8 User’s Guide with octal numbers. Intel later switched to hexadecimal so one byte (8 bits) was exactly two digits and two bytes (16 bits) was two pairs of digits concatenated.
Once graduated from Dartmouth with electronics and software experience, embedded-systems work kept coming to me ever after.
It’s nice when the work keeps coming to you. FYI I’ve posted two more columns (on B&W and Color TVs) since this blog: https://www.hackster.io/clive-max-maxfield/articles
One technology that exploded during the 1960s was computer mass storage. Early computers like the UNIVAC and IBM mainframes used drum memory in the 1950s and early 1960s — a spinning metal cylinder coated with magnetic material, with fixed read/write heads positioned over each track. But drum memory was soon edged out by magnetic disk storage, notably IBM’s 305 RAMAC in 1956 — the first hard disk drive. Without that mechanical marvel, today’s vast cloud data lakes would not exist. Curiously, those same data lakes still depend on mechanical principles born in the 19th century — spinning disks and actuator arms.
Good point — I might do a Throwback Thursdays column about data storage, including the floppy disks we used “back in the day” — in the meantime, I’ve posted a bunch more columns: https://www.hackster.io/clive-max-maxfield/articles