K
krw
Guest
On Fri, 19 Feb 2010 17:22:47 -0800, Joerg <invalid@invalid.invalid>
wrote:
had soldering irons (mostly the RF labs). Everythign else was done on
proto-boards or other fixtures.
In addition to maintaining the lab equipment we built fixtures and lab
setups. No one had any equipment of their own. The labs were
extremely well equipped, though. Almost all the equipment was Tek and
HP, with WaveTek being the popular generator.
wrote:
'74. I don't remember anyone doing labs at home and only a few labskrw wrote:
On Thu, 18 Feb 2010 17:49:38 -0800, Joerg <invalid@invalid.invalid
wrote:
Joel Koltner wrote:
"krw" <krw@att.bizzzzzzzzzzz> wrote in message
news:hforn5todgh8shm5elno5spnc0j3edk3n1@4ax.com...
Amazing. Where did you go to school?
University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In the early '90s there was still more variety of computers as well --
PCs were clearly the most popular with Macs second, but there were also
a sizeable number of people with Atari STs, Apple IIGSes, Amigas and
even some NeXTstations for the real hard-core computer guys; there were
user groups for most that met somewhere reasonably close to campus.
(The Amiga group that I occasionally visited met in the "union south,"
which was immediately adjacent to all the engineering buildings.)
We had a few rooms of 029s (perhaps sixty). They were clean and very
bright, if littered with cards and chad. I only took one CS course
(well, I started a PDP-8 assembly course but got sick so dropped it).
Wow...
When I returned for my master's at Oregon State here, I was a bit sad to
see that within engineering HP calculators had gone from >90% to <33%!
And solder irons had probably gone to even less that 33% :-(
I doubt 10% of my class owned a soldering iron. I doubt 10% know
which end to pick up today.
Not sure when you graduated but in my days (early 80's) nearly everyone
would solder until you had clouds in the room.
had soldering irons (mostly the RF labs). Everythign else was done on
proto-boards or other fixtures.
PCs were long-off. I worked in the EE department electronics "shop".Most of them were
assembling Apple II clones and such. One of my side jobs at the
university was to come up with low cost tools they can build. Poor man's
spectrum analyzer, function generators and so on. The plans were free
and if there were unavoidable difficult-to-buy parts we'd organize pool
orders and stuff.
In addition to maintaining the lab equipment we built fixtures and lab
setups. No one had any equipment of their own. The labs were
extremely well equipped, though. Almost all the equipment was Tek and
HP, with WaveTek being the popular generator.