Just go to http://soldersmoke.com. On that archive page, just click on the blue hyperlinks and your audio player should play that episode.
http://soldersmoke.com
Here is something nice to listen to in your shack...
I hadn't heard this one before. It is about Shep's teenage trip to a hamfest, but it also about his youthful enthusiasm for ham radio and electronics. Many of us can identify with this very easily.
He talks about what must have been a very early use of "blue boxes" -- the audio tone generators that allowed young miscreants (including the Woz) to make long distance phone calls for free. I wish I had gotten into this. It sounds like fun.
He talks about how painful it was to be on phone (AM phone) with just 2.5 watts homebrew, when everyone else was running a lot more power.
And wow, they played a baseball game at the hamfest. Phone guys vs. CW guys.
I won't spoil it by telling you the results of the hamfest raffle.
Thanks to Dan Random for alerting us to this. During the first five minutes Woz talks about being an "electronics kid" and becoming a ham radio operator. For me also, wired intercoms were a precursor to ham radio. More SolderSmoke blog posts on Steve Wozniak here: https://soldersmoke.blogspot.com/search/label/Wozniak%20--%20Steve
The Woz scared me for a second -- I tought he was going to leave a hot iron on the desk amidst paper and other flamable items. But no -- he put the soldering iron in its holder. Later we hear Woz talking about the need to update schematic diagrams. And I was esepcially taken by the use of wooden enclosures for electronic projects. My BITX rigs have followed the Apple example.
We talk a lot about putting soul in our new machines. The phrase comes from a book by Tracy Kidder. Ira Flatow of NPR's Science Friday recently took a new look at this book. There are TWO recordings in this link. Both are worth listening to. The second is an interview with the author, conducted at Google HQ in New York City. Woz chimes in.
At about 6:43 in the second interview, Ira Flatow and Tracy Kidder get into a little argument about how to pronounce the word "kludge." I'm with Ira -- the fact that he pronounces it this way makes me think that we are using a New York, or at least and East Coast pronunciation.
I am a big fan of Tracy Kidder. His "Mountains Beyond Mountains" is about Dr. Paul Farmer, a heroic physician who has dedicated his life to treating the poor people of Haiti. "My Detachment" is about Kidder's stint as an army officer in Vietnam. Kidder and his editor wrote a nice book about the crafts of writing and editing: "Good Prose." "Strength in What Remains" is about the genocide in Burundi.
Here is what I was trying to --- hic-- say about Steve Wozniak --hic-- in Podcast #139:
From "Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson:
"One of Steve Wozniak's first memories was going to his father's workplace on a weekend and being shown electronic parts, with his dad "putting them on a table with me so that I could play with them." He watched with fascination as his father tried to get a waveform line on a video screen to stay flat so that so that he could show that one of his circuit designs was working properly. "I could see that whatever my dad was doing, it was important and good." Woz, as he was known even then, would ask about the resistors and transistors lying around the house, and his father would pull out a blackboard to explain what they did. "He would explain what a resistor was doing all the way back to atoms and electrons. He explained how resistors worked when I was in the second grade, not by equations, but by having me picture it."
This is clearly the approach to electronics that we see in the book "From Atoms to Amperes" by F.A. Wilson.
Mike, KC7IT, gave Woz a new title "the uber-knack-master of all time":
Woz is the uber-knack-master of all time, and always has been in my book. His Apple II design is a work of genius in getting ten pounds of function out of five pounds of parts.
One of many examples: Apple II was the first personal computer to use DRAM memory chips, which were brand new then and kinda scary even for us pros. DRAMs store data as charges on tiny leaky capacitors. Every 20 milliseconds or so they have to be refreshed.
Everyone else had counters and logic just for refresh. Woz arranged the Apple II's display memory, so reading out the pixels to the TV screen 60 times per second did the refresh too, at no cost in circuits or performance. The elegant design of a pure knack genius.
"SolderSmoke -- Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics" is now available as an e-book for Amazon's Kindle.
Here's the site:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004V9FIVW
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