What is head?

[Owain]

"raden" wrote | I see no ladybird book on how to give head

Given the school curriculum these days, the publishers are missing an opportunity.

Owain

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Ladyboy books?

[Andy Wade]

F. J. Camm and the various surplus shops in Hurst St. and Digbeth in a certain city have a lot to answer for so far as I'm concerned. And F. G. Rayer, whose designs in PW never worked, but had proved very educational by the time I got them going. Yes components were expensive in those days of 2/6 a week pocket money. I used to scrounge old TV and radio sets to recycle the components.

is worth a look - has images of lots of old magazine covers. If you remember the Bernards Radio Manuals, have a look at and note the name of the author of the one at the bottom.

[Andy Hall]

There were numerous companies offering kits of valve based designs as I recall.

I can remember paying 10/- for a small germanium transistor......

I used to fix them for old ladies. Often it was valve pins oxidising and making poor contact or likewise with the contacts on the variable capacitor, or hum as a result of the smooting capacitor in the power supply having dried out.

"No stock" was a popular author and still is - far too often.

Clive Sinclair authored a number of books like this. Most of his circuits were "unusual" to be diplomatic about it.

[Mike Tomlinson]

In article , The Natural Philosopher writes

Alright, who's got the screen cleaner?

[Mike Tomlinson]

In article , [e-mail] writes

Ah, but killfiles are global.

[Andy Wade]

[electronics nostalgia]

Yes, loads, going back to the early days of broadcast radio.

I remember my dad shelling out 26/- for a genuine Mullard OC44 after considerable frustration with 'white spot' transistors - remember those?

Me too. ... or rectifier valves failing, output valves going soft, waxed paper 'condensers' going leaky, various timebase faults on TVs - all usually easy to recognise and fix.

"Authored" - oh please! Go and wash your keyboard. You'll be using "leverage" as a verb next... Yes, Clive's early career working for Bernards is quite well documented - e.g. in the book "Sinclair and the 'Sunrise' Technology" by Adamson and Kennedy (ISBN 0140087745): an entertaining read.

But some of them actually worked quite well (which is more than can be said of some of the products which were to come later :-) ).

[Andy Hall]

Definitely. I can remember using a white spot one to make a photodiode. I carefully cut the glass envelope near the bottom and washed out the blue-white paste inside, then replaced the glass with clear epoxy. It worked quite well.

Whoops..... sorry, that was a real slip.

Never that. I go through presentations from the U.S. and remove those and correct the spelling mistakes and date ordering.

The designs of some like the Spectrum relied on undocumented features of some of the components in misguided attempts to cut costs.

[Eiron]

His later business strategies seemed to be based on those of Bialystock and Bloom.

[Set Square]

That's one of my pet hates, too - especially when it's pronounced "levverage"! Ugh.

[Andy Hall]

It usually is........

[raden]

In message , Andy Hall writes

This is going to turn into another "Wayfinder" thread, isn't it

BTDT, they didn't have such easily printed T-shirts in those days

[Andy Hall]

I seem to remember T-shirts being smaller in those days though. Nowadays they seem to shrink so much.......

[IMM]

My Dad built a valved radio in the 1930s and it was in use until the 1950s. They lisened to "we shall fight them on the beaches" and all the other propaganda Churchill spouted in WW2. He got rid when he bought a Pye radiogram to mach the Pye TV he bought just after the war.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Not the ones Clive designed, they didn't.

The guy ddn't have more than half an A level to rub together, and no concept of anything technical, other than what he read in books.

He was a bit like IMM, with slightly more education, but just as dangerous around small children.

>

[The Natural Philosopher]

His earlier one's too.

Clibes whole career was a hype, and a fraud. It was mere accident that Curry and Hauser actually produed something that worked for him, much to his surprise. It was the first thing that actually DID. And the last IIRC.

Casny ou think of any other product that actally WORKED apart from the ZX81 and the spectrum?

I can't.

[Eiron]

Micromatic radio. The circuit board broke on first insertion of a battery. It worked after a fashion after that was beefed up.

The 1970's "hi-fi" stuff worked in a manner of speaking, though the low-tolerance linear volume pots were dodgy, the sound was curiously wooden and they kept blowing transistors.

The Black Watch - accurate to two minutes a day.

A calculator with reverse polish logic. That was a good idea!

Can't remember which "computer" it was in about 1980 but with

1KB of memory I wouldn't class it as working.

The C5 - we had a grand prix in the science park when Sinclair closed, leaving a load of them. They were fun. This was a good example of his strategy. He promised an electric car with new battery technology, got loads of venture capital and came out with a nominal product to save face.

Anyone old enough to remember the Class-D audio amps in 1965? I wonder if they ever worked?

[Andy Hall]

Cambridge or something? I made one of those from a kit but it was rather a disaster because the battery life was about 10 minutes and you couldn't read the display.

ZX80. It had 1k of memory but could be expanded to 16k at great cost.

Had a washing machine motor IIRC.

Were these the slimline look things in black styling with panel about

3cm high and about 20cm wide with the rotary controls on spindles going through trimpots on the PCB?

[Eiron]

No, those were the early '70s things I mentioned before. The later '70s stuff had sliders and was usually stuck to the front of a turntable, at least the preamp sections were. The PSU and power amps would go inside.

The Class D stuff was my memory failing me. This was what I was thinking of:

From the Sinclair MicroFM advert: "The final IF amplifier produces a square wave of constant amplitude which is eventually converted into uniform pulses so arranged that the original modulation is reproduced exactly. A pulse-counting detector ensures absolute linearity and therefore better audio quality at the output stages."

Eiron.

[Tony Bryer]

If some published a book of all those ads (not forgetting the Amstrad Hi-Fi amps with 92 knobs to turn) I'd be the first to buy a copy.