[Elecraft] OT: High school drafting class, ~1975

[Doug Person]

Fascinating walk through the past. I took mechanical drawing in my 
freshman year. Our high school was 4 years and no junior high. 
Mechanical drawing was by far my favorite class. I learned a lot about 
dimensions, angles, areas - basic geometry. It made math make sense.

My first novice station in 1962 was a Halicrafters S38E receiver which 
was terrible and a one-tube transmitter built from salvaged TV parts 
that was in the 1962 ARRL Handbook - which I still have complete with 
burn marks when I dropped the soldering iron on it.   My father gave me 
a Lafayette HE-10 receiver for Christmas that year. It was much better.

Ham radio and my familiarity with electronic circuits led me to a class 
in Autocoder, an assembly language for an IBM computer from the 60's. I 
don't recall what model. But - bits and bytes made perfect sense because 
to me they were just a series of switches and the logic of ANDs, ORs, 
XORs, etc were easy for me to visualize. I just thought of current 
making its way through a matrix of on or off switches. I proceeded to 
take ever computer class offered in that community college.

Although there have been many working titles for someone who writes 
code, and I've had about a dozen, I've always been proud to call myself 
a computer programmer. Nothing more and nothing less.

73, Doug -- K0DXV

On 4/26/2021 2:19 PM, John Saxon via Elecraft wrote:
>   I have greatly enjoyed the memory fest here.  Wasn't going to join in, but, Steve, your email really hit close to home.  I replied to Steve, intended for whole group.
>
> Took 'Mechanical Drawing' in Jr. high, loved it.  Also had drawing classes (course also included slide rule) first semester of college.
>
> I was a co-op student in EE and worked for NASA 1962-1967.  I was placed in a software group, kinda out of my degree, but I liked it and spent my career as a Software Engineer (in the day we were called 'programmers.')
> I was greatly blessed to be working at NASA at the beginning of operations in Houston.  The first computer I worked on was an IBM 7094, 32K of 36 bit words, 2 microsecond cycle time, mag tape OS, no disk.  We were located in what had been the PBS TV studio on the University of Houston campus, reworked to be a computer center - the space center (MSC) was under construction.  Languages were FORTRAN II, assembly (FAP) and eventually FORTRAN IV and assembly.  Punch cards of course.
> Slide rules indeed!  However, we also had a Friden mechanical calculator which could do square roots!!
>
> Ham rig at the time was a homebrew 6AU6-6146 from a QST article and Hallicrafters S-19R with Heathkit Q multiplier, dipole on 40m cw.
> As you, Steve, indicated I could not afford the HP 'digital slide rule' -- bought the TI version about a year later for a cost 1/2 of the HP, used it for years.  Still have my K&E DECI-LON (and a B-29  'Load Adjuster' slide rule from WWII).
> I remember all the items you mentioned.
> Finally (at last) I often tell younger folks (I am 77) that they have orders of magnitude more power in their cell phones than we had in our gigantic computers -- BUT -- we put men on the moon with 'em.
> Sorry for the wide bandwidth,73,John  K5ENQ
>
>
>
>      On Monday, April 26, 2021, 10:36:33 AM CDT, SteveL <lawresh at woh.rr.com> wrote:
>   
>   I envied a friend in a EE program and the University of Cincinnati.  He had the first HP-35 I’d ever seen the year it was introduced (1972), but it was way out of my budget as a new freshman studying Engineering.
>
> A couple of months after my friend acquired the HP-35, to my fascination he received a letter from HP detailing a list of obscure calculations the device performed in error (the tangent of 98.2352…, etc.) .  The letter went on to describe that these were determined and then verified by computer simulation of the computational algorithms used internally - a concept new to this budding engineer.  And, if he returned the calculator, it would be repaired and corrected.
>
> And to think we basically flew to the moon on a slide rule?  Who could ever imagine a computer that could fit into one room?  (Paraphrasing a line from early in the Apollo 13 movie.)
>
> Who carried around a CRC book of tables of various calculations in lieu of an unaffordable scientific calculator?
> Or programming FORTRAN on punch cards?
> Or PDP-8 on paper tape after toggling in the boot loader through the front panel switches?
>
> We’ve come a long way!  I love the reminiscences…
>
> Steve
> aa8af
>     
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