What Do We Really Know?

Bumming around the internet ( I don't know how to surf! ) I found this section on a site I visit every so often. Quizzes. Bunch of different topics. I ran through the 3 for Electronics - diodes, transistors, and basic electronics and got a 7 - 5 - 10 out of 10 for the 3 sections. I need to re-study my transistors. Many subjects to choose from. I always heard the more we use our brains now the least likely to get the 'old-timers' disease later on, so I like things to keep me thinking. Pick your subject and see how you do!

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/quiz/

 

The Bad thing on them type of quiz is that some people cheat and look up the answers.

But me i will see later on what i know.What my up is and downfall is.

I am in many areas some stronger than others.

Basic math is not one of them.But i can do higher grade math in my head.

 

Perhaps a better question is "do you know what you don't know?" I like the link, but it is tough to be reminded of what I am forgetting.

 

Yeah. Going through some of the topics I wish I had kept some of the books I got rid of cleaning out the sheds and closet spaces. But then again most of the info is available today on the net for refreshing the memory when needed.

 

Yeah, it would be nice to know everything, but the most important thing is knowing how to find everything. The internet has made that easier, providing you can filter the out the answers you really need.

 

I was taught along the way in electronics that you don't have to remember all the information, you have to remember where to find it.

Same thing!

 

I had two walls in my office with floor to ceiling bookshelves full of electronic component data books with nothing older than 1992 so all were pretty current. There were more than 4000 books and covering most major brands in both digital device families and analog device families. Since retiring from PCB design, I don't really use them so I offered them to one University and then to three technical colleges for free. The replies came back all with the same theme........why would we want to be going back to managing technical books when we now have the internet. Our students no longer need technical books as they now have the equivalent information online which they can access from anywhere.
Then I called up a couple of local electronic repair shops to see if their techs wanted any of the books but they said they don't keep data books anymore as the floor space for the bookshelves costs money and it can be used more cost effectively to store extra customer's jobs instead of storage for non paying reference material. In their business if they can't find data for a device on the internet then they tell the customer to scrap the item they are repairing as it is not worth chasing down the information.

It was a sad day for me when most of the books went to the paper recycling centre as they were the only people that would take them. The books cost me many tens of thousands of dollars and all were in perfect condition so it was a shame they would probably end up as toilet paper or boxes of tissues

It seems that there is no future for technical books so heaven help future designers if they lose internet access

 

You could have sold them online like ebay and made a little money of your money back.There are a few geeks out there that would have loved to have them for dirt cheap prices.

 

I did try to sell them but there were too many books for me to list and the two people enquiring wanted to see a complete list of all the books. I didn't want to spend three or four days cataloguing them all if there was going to be little interest. Several people enquired about the full list and I suggested they tell me what books they wanted and I would confirm whether I had them and what revision but nobody ever got back to me so I presume they didn't really want them.
When I put a "free to a good home" entry on Gumtree (similar to ebay but cheaper) people then didn't want to pay the packing and shipping as I offered to use Pack & Send because they have full tracking and are cheaper than Australia Post for heavy items.
Most of the Motorola, Intel, National Semiconductor, Analog Devices, Texas Instruments, Fairchild, Toshiba, SGS Thompson and Phillips data books were very expensive to purchase and came as complete sets covering all that brand's available devices but there were also a quite lot of books given for free by other manufacturers for specific families of devices. As head of the R & D PCB Design Department for a major international company I also got lots of free samples of the actual devices which I usually passed on to the guys in my lab. To give you some idea of the scope of the data book collection there were over 1000 books just on different types and brands of resistors, capacitors and connectors. I also had several data books that were full military classified and you needed security clearance to obtain the books because they had details of processors used in the Exocet missile systems as well as in several navy torpedoes and we were also using these same processors in several of our products.

In the end a station wagon and six trips to the paper recycling depot was the last solution as time had run out. I had already wasted more than six weeks with the two lots of advertisements then another three or four weeks with the schools and electronics shops. When I offered them free to the schools I sent letters to each school's librarian and also a letter to the heads of the electronics faculties which I then followed up a week or so later with a phone call.
Offering them for free, I thought the schools or the electronics repair shops would have jumped at them or at least even taken some of them but alas I was mistaken.......

 

I've used some of the material you're mentioning and had some of probably the same ones. The semiconductor data books with cross reference to compatible products, pinouts and dimensions. Sam's sheets. Microsoft Technical Reference. And all kinds of different amplifier, filters, oscillators, equalizers and I don't remember what all else. Amazed sometimes at the hardware, software and reference material I've burned through. Had 8080 computers still working when P4 and Celerons were the thing. 286, 386, hard drives and their controller boards, dual floppy controller boards. Still have some of the old software as it doesn't take up much space. Have Windows 1.0 on a 5 1/4 disk. Windows 3.1 on 3 1/4's. Windows for Networks 3.11 and of course MSDos 6.0 and stepup/upgrade to 6.22. Still see an old comp sometimes that has to have Dos installed before you can go to 98 before you can go to XP. And the test equipment. Been through the signal generators, oscopes, freq counters and dvm's. Everyone used to love having an 'octopus'. A few components and leads put together to check pn junctions by showing different lissajous patterns across the devices.

I like what StruldBrug said in that I hate to be reminded of what I'm forgetting but again, sometimes it's a fond memory!

 

If it was my choice I wouldn't either but I moved my office to a much smaller room in the house and there was no room after the 3 X 7 bay Thecus NAS servers and 1 X 12 bay Synology NAS server, two large i7 tower pcs, 1 X large watercooled i7 extreme gaming computer, a Dell i7 laptop, a 40" Sharp Aquos screen, a 3kva APC online sine wave UPS with two extra battery boxes, 1 X 24 port HP Pro Curve managed switch, 1 X Cisco 8 Port router, 1 X Motorola cable modem, 1 X 32 port CAT 6 patch panel, 1 X large wall mounted server rack cabinet with glass door, 1 X Canon MX 926 printer, 1 X Canon Powershot Pro SLR camera on tripod setup so I can put things under it and read them on the screen, 2 X Dali hi fi speakers, 1 X 650W Definitive Technology Supercube 3 subwoofer, 1 X Yamaha RS 700 hi fi amp, 1 X Rega Planar 3 turntable, 1 X 4 drawer filing cabinet, 1 X 2 drawer filing cabinet, 2 X Herman Miller Aeron chairs and a wall unit with my record collection. One of the old bookshelves now sits on one wall and has drawer units on most of the shelves and these have hand tools and spare parts and there are also 8 X cube crates with old but still good computer parts stacked under the corner of my desk that goes around three of the walls. There is also a stationery cupboard a huge portable fan that I use in Summer to blow cool air from the family room into the office.

I kept one of the original bookshelves in my wife's sewing room and that has some books that I kept as well as all my Electronics magazines. I have every issue of Electronics Australia from 1969 and every Silicon Chip from when the magazine started and I am still currently a subscriber. I also have most of the Electronics Today International mags but they went bust in the 1980s. I can't bring myself to toss the magazines as they have lots of handy circuits and I sometimes take the old ones out and reminisce how much things have changed.

 

Cool I never mastered Morse code in fact I have forgotten more than I ever knew
Analog radio transmitters is a grey area for me as I specialise in digital electronics and specifically miniature PCB design. Probably 75% of all car remote key tags and the matching body electronics modules in the world between 1995 and 2007 were designed by me or my team.
I also worked as a design contractor on the very first race cameras fitted to GP bikes (in 1991) and the design team were so successful that it evolved into stump cam where we put a tv camera inside a cricket stump and these are now used in test matches all around the world. The camera design project was requested by Channel Nine in Melbourne, Australia and I designed the surface mount PCBs as nobody in Australia was using surface mount technology let alone multi layer PCBs in 1990. We had to get the prototype PCBs made in the USA as Morris Circuits in Sydney were the only multilayer PCB maker in Australia and they were always booked out with jobs for the military. It was a challenging time

You are lucky your brothers have a common interest with you as I was the only one in my family with any sort of technical interest and I am also the only one with a decent engineering workshop. One of my brothers is an Air Traffic Controller and my other brother is a Structural Steel Draftsman while my sister is a Professional Musician and their interests outside of work are going to fashionable places to be seen and going shopping although one brother does like gardening.

 

[dr.m N5XBY[/QUOTE]
Suspicion confirmed!
SK de KB3??