[sdiy] Reprinting Electronotes

[Magnus Danielson]

From: Grant Richter <grichter at asapnet.net>
Subject: Re: [sdiy] Reprinting Electronotes
Date: Sat, 14 Dec 2002 07:03:47 -0600

Grant,

(Sigh!)

In the middle of everything, the Internet falls to pieces... takes hours for
me to grasp why and restart the right part of the router... lost a bunch of
emails that I wrote but never got sent... don't you just hate computers
sometimes???

I don't even recall what I answered to... I naturally messed up the outgoing
queue in my eager to test things...

Hell, I need a drink now...

> > I personally think the Electronotes is being over-rated, and that is due to
> > the
> > fact that this is not how people learn things these days and not due to what
> > it
> > actually contains and what influence it has back in the days. Older guys must
> > realize that Electronotes references is much more obscure than they used to
> > be.
> > 
> 
> This is an extremely good point.
> 
> While the underlying mathematical references are still good, the actual
> implementations are completely out of date.
> 
> Perhaps this is why Bernie is reluctant to see them published.
> 
> Fearing they might do more harm than good.
> 

There are many different aspects that goes into a certain design, they are
naturally coloured by what was reasnoble cost and available at the time.

If you look at Oberheim SEM and Buchla 200 series you see that those designs
became much bigger and sofisticated just because those designers could not
enjoy the benefits of using the JFET/MOSFET op-amps that came not much later.
Today we can enjoy choosing amongst many and pick out those which gives best
bang for the buck for each instance where as there where only a handfull
op-amps at all in the early days.

The "post mortum" analysis of schematics from those ages is interesting in
this sense.

For instance, a friend where making a Buchla 200-series inspired oscillator,
but he included the buffering which no longer where necessary. Just a straight
removal of components!

But it is not only such aspects which makes the Electronotes less usefull
today. It's simply not as spread today, so refering to EN#123 doesn't means as
much as it used to.

Cheers,
Magnus