HP-IB, Amigo/cs80 was Re: hp 9153 floppy & disk

Hmmm.. While I have never wanted to exclude anyone from an elitist 'club' (I will share my knowledge freely with anyone who asks, I will point people in the right direction, and so on), I do feel very strongly that there are certain skills, and certain knowledge that are _essential_ if you want to do any form of electronics. Of course if you don't want to do electronics, then you may not need these skills, I have no problem with that. I would including soldering on that list. Virtually all electornic circuits are assembles with soldered joints. Those infernal solderless breadboards are a waste of space or worse. They often develop intermittant connections, the stray capacitacne is excessive, and so on. Learning t osodler well enough to work with through-hole components should ony take an afternoon anyway. It's not difficult. I would also claim you need to understand some basic electronics. Oh, sure you can wire up a few switches and LEDs to a microcontroller port. And then find that the built-in pull-ups of the microcontroller are not suffiecient to pull the signal really high all the time so you get noise pickup. Or you link up a relay as a load without the protection diode and end up zapping the microcontroller from the back emf when you turn it off. And so on. I was the equivalent of a no-code-tech for many years. The only reason I am not any more is that the morse code requirement has been removed. I never could get my ears round morse... I would argue that there shouldn't be artificial barriers to doing this sort of thing. The morse code requriement made sense once, IMHO it doesn't any more. Please don't give me that worn out argument that many people enjopy morse. Of course they do. I woul;dn't for an instant support a _ban_ on using morse code on amateur bands. Just as I wouldn't support a ban on driving cars with 'crash' gearboxes. But that doesn't mean I think double declutching should be included in the driving test. In the same way I don't think that just because people once made their own grid leak resistors, that we should still require beginners to make them today. Go out and buy resistors. But you still need to understnad what they are used for, and how to calculate (or estimate) the right value to use. There is, IMHO, one problem to totallu dumbing things down, and if this makes me elitist, so be it. It's this. If everyone thinks they can do electronic design just becasue they've plugged a sensor board into a microntroller board, then those people who really can design at the chip level or below are no longer valued, at least not by the majority. And that is a pity Als, if you're not careful, this 'plug a few modules together' methodology leads to a number of very poor, over-complex designs. And some of them may even end up as products :-( I am sure I've told you how I once showed a so-called designer who wanted to use a microcontrolelr module + input interface modules + ... as part of a control system that his problem could be solved using few lengths of wire and otherwise unused contacts on his relays and swithces. Hmmm... -tony