[sdiy] OK you asked for it...

[harrybissell]

The "memories" thread 4/5/00 - 4/7/00

So if you start like I did, a broke teenager who wants to
build some synth modules, you'll have a much easier
time today than in 1970. I could not get perf board,
so my first synthesizer was made on unperforated
phenolic board, and the component holes drilled one
at a time for each component. Suffice to say, things
are a lot better today.
-Grant Richter

For me it was 10 years later (around 1980), but "broke teenager"
would be a perfect description as well.

CA3080 ? Too expensive. Started to explore discrete transistors
(often unsoldered from broken HiFi stuff) for VCAs instead.

Veroboard was unreachable for me as well. I made my first
PCBs with thick enamel paint and a tiny brush on the raw copper,
and got the right chemicals somewhere to etch the boards.
(After getting *very bad* results with nitric acid - which I
stupidly thought the only acid to bite copper (;->)  )

And then I remember I had the whole layout in mirror image
rather than right. Helped myself by bending all the opamp's
pins upward and soldering the ICs in bottom up. (Ouuuch - not
recommended !)

Those were the times in a little German town without a proper
electronics shop ...
- Juergen Haible.

Awww, you kids were spoiled.... back in MY day, we didn't even have solder
-- had to melt two components together over an open fire.
Tools?  WE couldn't afford tools;  had to bite pieces of metal with our
teeth.  And WIRE??? WE had to stretch our OWN wire from old bits of junk
copper.....
- Greg Montalbano

YOU HAD WIRE? YOU WERE LUCKY!  I HAD TO MAKE SYNTH MODULES FROM INSIDE A
HOLE IN THE ROAD, DODGING TRUCKS AND CRAZY MOTORCYCLISTS WHILE TRYING TO
MOVE THE ELECTRONS AROUND WITH A STICK.
-Rory Mc Donald

...and we had to make ring modulators with
cat's whisker rectifiers. You just try to
get 4 cats to hold still while you
trim them out.
Sorry,
 -Toby Paddock

Ha! At least you didn't have to smelt your metals in a
furnace hand made from clay you gathered yourself, using
ore that you mined yourself with bare hands from the base
of cliffs, and wood and coal that you
gathered/mined/split/ignited with your bare hands like I
had to. And that was before I developed opposable thumbs on
my hands!  ;-)
-Doug Tymofichuk

Ha!  Well at least YOU had hands!  We only had our amoebic appendages
with which to try to move things with!  In fact, we had to spend millions
of years evolving just so we could learn to eat without resorting to
osmotic principles!
   Er, can we give this a rest?
-   Tony Clark

Just for the record you are homosapiens, are you? ;^)
Cheers Theo

While your were developing opposable thumbs, I was making music the easy
way. Just use a large thigh bone and beat on that big black tower the flying
saucer left. Rocks beat together made a good sound also.
-Tim Daugard

...YOU WERE LUCKY!
And you tell the kids today, they don't believe you...
Regards,
Tony 'Mad sir' Allgood

single celled organisms?  you had it easy...

we used to live, all 100 billion of us, in a little puddle of ooze down by
the ocean.  We didnt even have oxygen in those days... Every day for
billions of years we'd have to get up at the crack of dawn, go out in the
ooze and try to assemble ourselves into a self-replicating protein that
contained the blueprint of life, and every night when we'd come home our
daddy would whip us and beat us to sleep with a water molecule.... and do
you think we ever got paid?  NO!

synthesizers... ha!  try synthesizing dna.  no oxygen and nothing to eat and
getting zapped by lightening all the time... we had it rough.
- Christian Oncken

Man that's nothing,
The big bang, you should have been there....
- Theo



Gene Stopp wrote:

> Not african or indian, but scripting language...
>
> anyway nobody took my bait! :(  it was the line "you people are lucky. you
> actually have a work room" which reminded me of "you think you had it bad,
> we lived in a shoe box in the middle of the road and every evening father
> would come home and kill us" (in my best Michael Palin accent)
>
> I don't know, Rude, it almost sounds worth the tight conditions to be in
> Amsterdam.
>
> - Gene
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Magnus Danielson [mailto:cfmd at bredband.net]
> Sent: Tuesday, June 08, 2004 1:27 PM
> To: gene at ixiacom.com
> Cc: synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl
> Subject: Re: [sdiy] Warning: More pics
>
> From: Gene Stopp <gene at ixiacom.com>
> Subject: RE: [sdiy] Warning: More pics (was: Messy Work Room)
> Date: Mon, 7 Jun 2004 16:32:01 -0700
> Message-ID: <15FDCE057B48784C80836803AE3598D503A55B04 at racerx.ixiacom.com>
>
> > uh oh i sense an impending flood of monty python references... :)
>
> That depends... is it an indian or african monty python reference?
>
> Cheers,
> Magnus - who loves the word montypythonesque!
>
> > - Gene
> >
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: owner-synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl
> > [mailto:owner-synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl]On Behalf Of Rude 66
> > Sent: Monday, June 07, 2004 4:21 PM
> > To: synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl
> > Subject: Re: [sdiy] Warning: More pics (was: Messy Work Room)
> >
> >
> >
> > you people are lucky. you actually have a work room.
> > our house is a 1 bedroom in amsterdam, with the living room doubling as
> > studio, workspace for my wife and for my writing, workbench, archive space
> > for vinyl and dj booth. looking around me, i'm surrounded by synths, a
> giant
> > mixer, stacks of vinyl and cd's and a pretty big scalextric race track
> that
> > i'm putting together, with ray wilson's synth and my 76477 project synth
> > currently acting as a bridge for track.
> >
> > we live in one of the most beautiful buildings in the whole world, but
> > sometimes i feel like trading it for some new built appartment with an
> extra
> > room to work in.. especially when building or repairing synths.
> >
> > r./
> >
> >