Punch cards

[Gene Heskett]

On Monday 07 April 2008, Tim wrote:
>On Mon, 2008-04-07 at 02:04 -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
>> That test was pretty close to the SB in terms of rating a child's IQ.  We
>> had several who took it the same year I did that went on to do some
>> unusual things, and we topped the list, not in grades earned in school
>> because most of us were bored silly by school but 4 of that class made
>> scores in the middle 140's, with me at the top with 147.  Had I known then
>> what an influence they would have, I would have quit doing electronics
>> service and wiggled into that door somehow.  OTOH, electronics in general
>> has been good to me.  I can't complain, and at 73, its too late to buy a
>> new horse.
>
>When I formally studied electronics it was in a technical college as a
>teenager.  Most of the other students were older than me, there were at
>least a couple I think had retired.  They weren't the only ones doing it
>for their own interest's sake.  Later on, I only continued doing the
>course for interest's sake - I was interested in engineering but was
>conned into a servicing course, instead.
>
>On the whole, I think things would have been better if I'd studied both
>areas, they're not the same, but they do dovetail.  I see plenty of
>equipment that's badly engineered, that someone who had to repair it
>would have designed differently.  And plenty of repairs that were done
>by someone who should have known a lot more about how to build things.
>
>You're probably better of working in electronics.  I'm damn sure that I
>am.  At least you know how things work, are supposed to work, and can
>make them obey.  There's something very satisfying at seeing something
>you fixed twenty years ago, still going strong.  I doubt we'd be able to
>say the same sort of thing about computing, at least these days...
>Integrity and reliability went out the window decades ago, so did
>knowing how it works.

So it seems, Tim.  One of the basic tenets of how I work is that I will fix it 
according to the factory drawings, once.  If I have to do it again, then it 
gets my attention and I'm actively looking for whats not right.  When the 
third failure occurs, that piece gets redesigned according to me.  I can 
count the 4th failures on one hand in 60 years of this.  Not counting 
customer PEBKAC of course.  The world keeps inventing ever more ingenious 
idiots...

My educational background is almost zilch, I've taught more tech classes than 
I have attended.  An 8th grade education & a G.E.D.  My start?  I had an 
alcoholic uncle who, during WW-II, worked as a postal delivery type in 
downtown Des Moines, and he usually had a radio in the bottom of his mailbag, 
either going back to a customer after repairs, or given to him to be repaired 
while he walked his route.  I think I was about 8, maybe 9 when I asked him 
as he was changing the filter capacitor in one of those 'all american 5 
tubers', what was actually wrong with the part he was taking out, and he 
couldn't tell me!  He was going by a recipe on the inside of the cupboard 
door that said to change them if the radio had a hum.

So I set out to find out what the part was, and how it could fail.  
Fortunately, my mother knew where the library was, and one of the things they 
taught me early on was how to read at 500 or so with good comprehension.  The 
net result was that by the time I was in the 6th grade, I actually had a 
better physics/electronic education than a high school graduate of the day.

Having a health problem that turned out to be a food allergy when we found it 
several years later, school was both difficult and painful, so when they quit
taking my Dr's excuses for my absences, I said to hell with it, and started to 
do some service work for cig money.  By the time I was 16, I was doing the 
service bench at the zenith wholesaler in Des Moines for all of Iowa and the 
northern half of Missouri, where I learned just how educational the 
oscilloscope can be, and I've never been without one since.  Being able to 
watch a circuit do its thing, in real time, is worth 100x what all the math 
is when its time to see why its not working as planned, although there is a 
place for the math too at times.  What algebra I know, a TI SR-51 calculator 
taught me.  However, I'm not too sure all the dealers at the annual show for 
the new models in the fall of '51, were convinced this 16 year old behind the 
podium knew what he was talking about!  There were a couple of them that 
called my bluff and went away chagrined.

The rest as they say, is now history, although I quit the cig habit cold 
turkey about 19 years ago this month, and I've spent the last 44 years as a 
broadcast engineer, the last 24 as the Chief at WDTV and I'm still doing some 
of that one or two nights a week as we get ready for digital.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
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