The AM Forum

Your mind is cluttered with pins 2 and 7 for octal fils., 3 and 4 for 7 pin mins., 4, 5, and 9 for 9 pin mins., 4 and 6 for octal 5y3's, 2 and 8 for HV AC and so on.  ( I think; you know how memory is, back when is meant is. ;) )

Mono audio amps, Fisher, and all those. Binaural with two tone arms, Garand changers, GE VR-II electrodynamic pickups, wharfdale 13,000 line speakers, huge air coil and back to back electrolytic caps for crossovers to tweeter, bass reflex, tuned organ pipe, plywood enclosure for sub-woofer ...and on and on. My dad was in fierce competition with a very close HiFi buddy.  Each meeting to show off the latest causing another round of trading up with the big supply houses in NYC, stuff delivered by Railway Express. Later in the stereo era he had me build up a Citation II with his oppressive oversight.

My dad even had a swing out mount from hidden shelf for the record changer. In stereo era playback was with Pickering IV cartridges, Rek-o-cut (sp?) platters, strobed of course, gram weights and balances.

Steel chassis, tons of iron, choke power supplies.

And I'm not even mentioning all the RF circuitry.

The link output article brought this stuff to mind. Actually I really enjoyed the whole magazine. Didn't even know it existed and was enamored with the typical three band, four tube plus rectifier chassis sold by every radio house over there.  EL34's in a Mullard designed amp brought even more US clutter to mind.

Quick Segue to LTC 2208's ADC's and where did all the years go?  --Big gap in the middle.
Oh wait, how could I forget the years of trying to learn 6502, 65c02, assembly programming in the early 80's.  Beagle Bros. Forever!

"Oh wait, how could I forget the years of trying to learn 6502, 65c02, assembly programming in the early 80's.  Beagle Bros. Forever! "
 


 
NOP $EA 


my favorite

klc

I used to pride myself with reciting AA5 tube line up.....12be6, 12ba6, 12av6, 50c5, 35w4, or 12sa7, 12sk7, 12sq7, 50l6, 35z5, and some of the alternates. I can't remember the Loctal numbers though. Most likely those tubes used a power transformer.

Pick almost anybody staring at a cell phone, and ask them if they know what the AA5 tube line up is. They will likely think your nuts.

Then I moved on to the Ti TMS9900 u-processor. 64 pins, 64 instructions. I've had all 64 pins stuck in my body too when they suddenly pop out of the socket.

Jim
Wd5JKO

You know you're old when your students are the same age as your grandchildren. :'(


Phil

I once worked in a radio station with Gates 16" transcription turntables and Gray Research arms. The GE VR-II pickups had a sweet and natural sound as I recall.

Today, my DX-100 has a pair of 1625s dated 1944, so they're two years older than I am.  As long as they're still working OK, there's hope for me!

You know you are old when it takes you all night to do, what you used to do all night!

And "three times in one night" didn't mean trips to the bathroom.

Or somebody asks you why they called 7 pin miniature tubes "miniature" when they as so "big" [compared to current parts].  Of course this person has never seen a 4-1000 or similar.

Monaural times two. Stromberg Carlson AM FM tuners. Two separate units in one handsome chassis with a common supply, There were short experiments transmitting stereo using one AM and one FM station. You would tune in both and listen through a set of mono hi-fi amplifiers or the new stereo amplifiers. The FM side of the tuner had already an output jack for a future stereo adapter. In those brief days it was not that important that both amps be alike, for hearing a binaural programme over the air was a new and heady experience. The vocalist-heavy channel would be on AM and the orchestra-heavy channel on FM. That's what I'm talking about!

You are in a meeting at work, and no one is even near your age.

Your boss talks about a program he wants the company to start using. When you ask about it and his very nice response is "It's a more sophisticated version of the one we all learned to use on our PCs in college." You learned FORTRAN with punch cards in college.

Yeah, that kind of dates it fairly closely.  ;D  My first and only prog. course was Fortran IV-G too.
Marietta College didn't even have a computer, not even for payroll. They were talking about an IBM with COBOL system "some day." 

Our one and only lab was a trip to DuPont chem. Complex down the Ohio River to watch the cards being punched and see if our programs would run. My runnable (not) program was the generation of a sine wave. We were told not to hog the resources.

My final program, unrun but just checked and graded for syntax and loop logic was the design of an achromatic telescope objective.
To keep that manageable, the interior curves of the crown and flint were same, and one external curve Plano. Crown and Flint indices came from a lookup table.  Oh I was so proud of it. Got a "C."  Found out there were some way smarter kids in that class.

Back in the early 70's when we were building Full Compass Studio in Madison,we took a tour of studios in Chicago including Columbia. They had a cage back in the corner of the control room filled with a couple dozen Marantz mono tube amps.  You could feel the heat from 20 feet away. The room was dark except for that corner lit up by all the amps.  I too worked for a station with those 16" tables, Gray tone arms and G.E. mono cartridges.

How many know the "Bad boys rape our  young girls but Mary gives willingly" that was for learning the resistor color code?

I thought it was "Bad boys rape our young girls but violet gives with green stamps"  Gotta cover the gold and silver tolerance bands too!

How many of us remember getting Sperry and Hutchinson green stamps and pasting them in the books, and when enough books are filled up we go "buy" products at the redemption center......

...



Bad booze rots our young guts, but vino goes well. (get some now)



klc

Yes, it was Violet not Mary.

"Behind victory garden walls" should give some indication of the date!

Color code same as white light into rainbow color-order by prism. Then just add up front black first, being darker, then brown, etc.  Oh don't forget white, gray and gold in their places and special cases.  ;D

I've noticed in crossword puzzles that indigo is added between blue and violet.
Remember your first box of eight color crayons?  purple forever; what's "violet", some strange grown ups' term?

Bell Operators Give Better Service.........color code for multi-pair Telco cables

Big Orgy Going Bad

Blue Orange Green Brown  was the incorrect method I learned for ether net cables years ago.....

--Shane
KD6VXI

A cleaner version that I remember from some ancient ARRL publication:

"Big Boys Race Our Young Girls, But Violet Generally Wins."

I taught this to my helper recently. He reveres the old ways. Its up to him to substitute chosen words.

    " Yes, it was Violet not Mary. "

     
      I'm sure Mary gets around too.

        klc

My first encounter with this mnemonic was in a copy of the 1966 ARRL Handbook at my high-school library.  And it was the "dirty" version, written in the margin. :o ;D

And please do not forget at the end of the Violet saying, to remember the tolerances, you can add "Get Some Now"

I learned that at the end it read "..... but Violet gives willingly for Gold and Silver." 

... or nothing.


A real tramp.

KLC

Nothing is 20%.  ;D

I remember learning it as the basic Blue-Orange-Green-Brown-Slate when I was a summer hire for NY Telco in college doing service disconnect equipment pickups and prewiring out of the Westchester County Greenburgh garage, just off of I-287.  Prewiring was a lot more fun than disconnects.  I had a telco van (Corvair Greenbrier) where you sat ahead of the front wheels,it took a bit of getting used to making sharp turns from there.  Loaded up the truck with big spools of four pair and a big electric drill that had a small lead acid battery in a metal box about the size of a lunch pail.  Went out to subdivisions and individual houses under construction and ran wiring  throughout the houses after they were framed up but before the walls were closed in.  NY Tel did the prewiring free of charge then, having outlets all over the house meant more customers wanting to have extensions.  On some big house jobs I would put in 16 pair.  Also helped pull a lot of 16 pair through office building overheads, and punch the wiring onto the big white termination blocks.

In those pre-GPS days I had to navigate around Westchester using one of those big street atlases.  Since I lived over in Rockland County, and only had been driving for a few years, I knew very little about getting around Westchester.

I once got to a job site and my big reel of 4 pair was missing from the van, and the back door was open.  Apparently a few miles back the door popped open going over a bump, and out the reel went.  I backtracked my route and an old geezer was sitting in a lawn chair by the side of the road with my cable reel.  "Figured you would be back for it eventually." , he said.

  I began my electronics training at a JC in the Bay Area around 1976, we were taught the "Black Boys R*&%^ our Young Girls but Violet Gives Willingly" version. There were a number of women in the class who worked for AT&T and they DID NOT like that!! Even then I was surprised that the instructor would use such a thing, today the PC Police would have you in deep poo poo.