MD, it seems that still you are keeping all the books and have a bit of knowledge about it. During my college days, programming with microcontroller and design circuits with LIC (Linear Integrated circuits) are my favorite areas. For leaning towards that I had purchased some books too, but later I lost all such collections in transit from my home town to working place. Now I have only a junk of hobby and circuit design magazines. My job is transferable across different locations, so I think it's a headache to carry all such books from place to place.
Now Googling is the easiest way for any info gathering
Glen Chenier 3/20/2012 7:43:15 PM User Rank Blogger
Re: Of Books...
Scope_Master_G, I still occasionally refer to my copies of the Handbook of Black Magic and the MECL handbook. The old HP application notes were informative. Wore out 2 copies of the ARRL Radio Amateur handbook, but a big influence was science fiction and stories like John Frye's Carl & Jerry series in Popular Electronics and a couple of ham radio teen novels by Walker Tompkins K6ATX.
That looks and sounds exceedingly cool. Bet it would make agreat app!
Wow, it also reminds me of this amzing machine they used to have at the Ontario Science Centre. It was a 2-story (or so) high mechanical AND-OR machine - an early PLD if you like. Gates, with mysterious mechanisms hidden inside them, were joined by clear tubes through which travelled ping-pong(?) balls. To start the operation, you would select 5 or 6 of the 12 possible "inputs" to activate by releasing their balls. These would drop through the tubes, enter the gates, and so on, until, if you had selected the correct input pattern, the final gate at the bottom would spit out its ball and a bell would ring.
Building a small version of this is on my project list!!!
When I was a kid, my grandfather pulled a dusty three-ring binder off the shelf in his garage laboratory and gave it to me. It contained all three years of a column in Product Engineering magazine by William S. Bennett entitled "Binary Logic."
It was like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book for learning digital circuits. Bennett would show you a contraption made of switches and light bulbs, or springs and plates, or even pneumatic tubes, and ask you to predict what it would do. Then you'd jump to the page number corresponding to your choice and find out whether or not you were correct. Had a huge impact on me and what I chose to do for a living.
Re MECL handbook: Some of those old "databooks" contained tons of great information. I was going to say "They don't write'em like they used to", but maybe they do, and I just haven't noticed.
Do companies still put out databooks, app manuals, etc?
One of the more recent books that has been extremely useful to me, especially when I first started my career is, "High Speed Digital Design, A Handbook of Black Magic," by Dr. Howard Johnson and Martin Graham. The 'sequel' by the same authors, "High-Speed Signal Propagation," is also an excellent resource.
A text with some great technical data that is still relevant today is the old Motorola MECL System Design Handbook.
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