have been involved with electronics since 1957, when as a student at Northern Secondary School
here in Toronto, I completed the entire years assignments in my electrical
class within two weeks, and was allowed to spend the rest of the Year on an advanced
project of my own choosing. I chose to build a three tube Hi Fi amplifier
from scratch using the plans in a Radio Electronics magazine. A student who had
passed the course the year before but had to repeat his year for other reasons
was to work on it with me. I soon discovered I had a flare for the engineering
side of electronics when I tracked down the noise problems in our careful workmanship
to a faulty design. The Power Transformer was mounted on the same chassis, and though
it was electrically isolated properly, it was not magnetically isolated from the
chassis properly. Some brass bushings, and a set of brass screws and nuts,
cleared the problem up nicely.
Well I made the transition from tubes to transistors
of all kinds, and from transistors to integrated circuits both linear and digital.
Today I can honestly say there isn't an electronic component part I haven't toyed
with and used for both its intended purpose, and in less conventional ways. I was
lead to computers when I started to play with the Large scale
integrated circuit chips and early microprocessors.
