[sdiy] Horowitz/Hill

[Tom May]

"jhaible" <jhaible at debitel.net> writes:

> Funny, even though my education was called study of electrical
> engineering (Elektrotechnik), most books were not on electronics,
> but on mathematics, system theory, circuit analysis (means: RLC
> circuits), Electrodynamics (E and H fields ...) and digital signal
> processing.

Funny or sad, that is pretty much my experience exactly (BSEE 1987),
except we had a small amount of digital.  But no tubes.  The analysis
was heavy, design and practical considerations such as resistor power
ratings and setup and hold times and power supply decoupling was
sorely lacking.  Even the digital stuff was mostly analysis of how the
gates worked.  I learned almost everything I know about digital making
a 7400-series TTL ALU as a 9-year old, and interfacing things to
computers in high school.  I have a friend with a philosophy degree
who is much better at digital than I am based on what he picked up and
was allowed to do hands-on in high school and continues to do to this
day.

> And when, after 2 years of maths, the first active circuits were subject
> of the lectures, the prof came up with tubes instead of transistors.
> I still have vivid memories of the shock when feedback theory
> wasn't taught to us on transistors, but on tube circuits.
> "It's a good exercise to learn it on tubes and then apply your
> knowledge to transitors". Bastard!

I think we learned feedback theory as exactly that: theory, with black
boxes full of system functions.  My own shock, learning about tubes on
my own years later, was finding that most or all of the stuff we
learned on transistors had been worked out decades before on tubes!
No one ever mentioned this.  It was like electronics started with the
transistor.  The things those old timers could do with a handful of
tubes, like making a TV, blows me away.

Tom.