***Editor’s Note: The “I Became An Engineer” blog runs every friday. To share your story email kasey.panetta@advantagemedia.com***
This week’s story is brought to us by reader Gary Crowell:
I became an engineer because of a book.
Positively traceable to one specific book: “Computers! From Sand Table to Electronic Brain”, by Alan Vorwald and Frank Clark. I was in the seventh grade in 1964. For the previous few years I had fiddled with your typical kid electrical stuff, build an electric motor, one-transistor radio kits and stuff like that. But this book had a chapter in the back about how to build an actual working electronic computer.
That clicked, and I had to do it.
It was immediately beyond the scope of any adults in my life, so it was all on me. My mother surprised me by meeting with the 9th grade science teacher at my school to see if he thought it was feasible. With his ok, I was off. Now, as a ‘computer’, all it was, was a chain of flip-flops; pulse the input and it counts up.
But it sounded magical.
This was the early ‘sixties; no LED’s for the output – so this thing used incandescent bulbs and the flip-flop transistors were power TO-3’s that cost $10 each. The soldering was horrible but I got everything connected and a flip-flop worked! Then I needed a reliable means to pulse the input and the book had the answer to that: a telephone dial. Now this was also the days of the Bell system, and they were very suspicious of anyone who wanted to buy telephone components. But my mother negotiated with a local distributer and I was the owner of a brand new telephone dial. The single flip-flop would then blink on and off when a number was dialed. Kind of boring, so I needed more flip-flops. I still can’t believe my mother let me sink so much money into this thing, but eventually I had eight working. It would add numbers that were entered on the dial, the display on the lights being in binary of course. All the way up to 255! Multiplication was just successive addition. And by flipping a switch, it would subtract too. Division! When demonstrated before my class, my nerdism was sealed. But a computer from a book. I was hooked.
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