As I've said several times before, I suspect '01s are a lot easier to find _now_ than some parts for, perhaps, 10 year old computers. There's a nice little series of books called 'The Impoverished Radio Experimenter' which have designes for 'breadboard' receivers. They use octal-base valves plugged into those screw-terminal sockets normally used for holding power relays. Home-wound coils, of course (even the IF transformers in the superhet). Alas I know too well what you mean :-( Given that I don't think in terms of programming, and am much happer with a scheamtic than with a VHDL listing, and that I am much, much, happier with a 'scope than a simulator, is there any hope for me? Or should i connect myself between the anode and cathode of an 807 running at full power? -tony

Define "hope" and maybe I can tell you. :-/ Well, I feel quite certain that I speak for more than just myself when I say you'd be sorely missed here. But I know what you mean. More and more often, in recent years, I've felt severely out of step with the society I'm trying to live in, and one respect - the one that seems to me to be most relevant here - is that I strongly believe in understanding things all the way down. (Of course, nobody can quite achieve that, but the closer the better.) xkcd #435, kind of - knowing the lower levels makes me better at the upper levels in so many different ways. I remember once I built a ROM dumper and it would always read the last byte as FF, even in cases where I knew it wasn't. Turned out I'd forgotten to connect one of the power pins (must've been ground), and, provided at least one input was at each level, they powered the chip through the input clamp diodes. But when all the address pins were high, there was no ground, so all outputs were perforce high. (I must have tied chip enable and such to the ground pin rather than circuit ground....) If I'd chunked the chip as a logic element in my mind, instead of knowing about - and being aware of - things like clamping diodes that don't affect its operation as a logic device but do matter when operated outside those bounds (as, here, without a normal power supply), this would have been totally mystifying rather than understandable. I get the feeling that, especially with high tech, we are running on autopilot as far as understanding is concerned: we as a society don't really grok things, but are just using what's already in place and forgetting we don't know how it works and aren't competent to fix it. Companies with retired employees who discover there's nobody left who understands critical machinery enough to deal with unexpected behaviour are a classic example. (I'm not just talking about computers; it happens in everything from power plants to assembly lines.) It's one reason I try to be as much of a generalist as feasible. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

On 23 Mar 2009 at 19:19, Tony Duell wrote: I suspect it would take at least an 813 to take you down, Tony! --Chuck

While, as you know, I generally prefer practical tests/demonstrations, I have no intention of testing _that_ practically ;-) -tony