Looking back through time.

[nigelwright7557]

In 1980 I did a industrial electronics course parts 1 and 2.
I did it full time at a Government skill centre.
It was what they called a TOPS course, training opportunities scheme.
I really enjoyed the course, it was half day theory and half day practical.
I came out of it with distinctions in my exams.

Today I went back to see if the place still exists and it does but its now an auto parts centre.

The place is about 60 miles from where I used to live and trying to find it again was a nightmare. Lots of new roads and roundabouts to negotiate.
I eventually found it.
The journey brought back a lot of memories of a good time.
From that course it got me into electronics, first as a test engineer.
I progressed on to repairs then dabbled a bit in design all for the same company.

The day out to revisit the place was shook me up quite a bit.
I am no longer in electronics and no longer married.
So it brought back a lot of memories of that time.

I guess in one sense I am still lucky, I get to do electronics/software in my own time so I can pick it up and drop it as I please. I can also choose what projects I take on.

Its pretty scary, the course was 35 years ago and the time seems to have flown in.

 

[vinylkid58]

Its pretty scary, the course was 35 years ago and the time seems to have flown in.

It's amazing how quickly the years have gone by.

jeff

 

[oldschooltube]

Ditto that. Life can be like driving down the highway and you look up and say "whoa, how the heck did I get here?".

In the words of Ferris Bueller: "Life moves pretty fast, if you don't stop and look around once in a while you just might miss it."

 

[M Gregg]

LOL,

I used to think if I double my age and I'm still alive I'm OK..
So what happens when you can't double your age..

I thought back a while ago about school and found some old photos.
I remember a head teacher in an infants school telling us the story of the playground tree..here is the story,

The care taker planted some trees in a playground with some stakes to hold up the saplings the stumps were pressure treated with creosote to last. A year later..two of the trees died and the head said take them out they look terrible..

After a short while the caretaker came back to the head and said look at this..
He took the head to one tree that was dead and showed him the tree was dead however the creosoted stump had started growing with one small branch with a couple of leaves..

The head said leave it if it wants to live that much who am I to say differently..over the years the stump grew into a large tree..

At that school..I remember attending a final after school leaving party where we all stood in a circle and sang old lang syne...it was dark when we went home..I remember looking back (I didn't like school) but wondered what would happen now..I stood in the same spot and looked at the derelict ground..The school is now gone..

It reminds me of my fathers death...looking at photos..<<the derelict land is all around us..its only when we stop that we see it..

Reminds me of a poem..

When as a child I laughed and wept,
Time crept.
When as a youth I waxed more bold,
Time strolled.
When I became a full grown man,
Time RAN.
When older still I daily grew,
Time FLEW.
Soon I shall find, in passing on,
Time gone.

Almost every place I have attended up until now has either been knocked down or changed purpose..

As Dr who once said there is no point in being grown up if you can't be a child sometimes..

Live life..its not a rehearsal...but it does feel like it sometimes..

Such was the fait of the Cyclops cursed to know his own end..
Its good to look back but don't dwell on it or you will miss everything yet to be!

Regards
M. Gregg

 

[M Gregg]

Just on reflection,

I sit sometimes and try to think of the first thing I can remember...its an interesting exercise..try it you might be surprised. Then try to feel how you felt and let the you now melt away...how did you think when you couldn't talk? Can you remember...its very interesting..🙂

Can you remember the first day at school then go earlier..how deep the snow seemed when you were little...we had bad fogs..I look at a mouse card I made for mothers day and try to remember the smell of the old purple ink and printing...learn to write your name...the crush in the playground..

Can you remember anyone singing to you to go to sleep...

Regards
M. Gregg

 

[john blackburn]

First day at school and the teacher smelling strongly of what I now know to be carbolic soap.

Fifty years on and one sniff of carbolic will still make me think of Mrs Palmer and a bottle of warm, slightly soured school milk about to be forced down my throat.

John

 

[M Gregg]

The more you relax and try to remember,

Think of land marks like xmas or potty training sounds nuts doesn't it..the tippy cup..toys..the trick is to go back just for fun..

Did you ever fall down the stairs..shock land marks..

The adult blocks it..Its an interesting exercise...

Regards
M. Gregg

 

[dchisholm]

. . . . Today I went back to see if the place still exists and it does but its now an auto parts centre . . .

Nigel, it looks like you and I went to different schools together so it's not surprising we are experiencing similar events. I think I expressed similar thoughts in the thread "Slow down . . . a poem" http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/lounge/253562-slow-down-poem.html#post3868711 about a year ago.

An experience more closely matching yours, came to me in the fall of 2013. I happened to be near to my old High School, on a weekday during the school year, and dropped in for a visit. I'm sure I upset somebody's plans but the staff provided a student aide to be my tour guide, and an assistant principal joined us for much of my visit. He even recorded some of my comments, anecdotes, and musings in a notebook - possibly to use as evidence in some future proceeding.

For the most part the facility was functionally the same as it had been 45 years previously. Some walls had been torn down, and others put up; furniture and equipment had been replaced or modernized; one wing of the building had been demolished to make room for the expansion of another wing. But it was still mostly recognizable as the school I had attended. I had no difficulty imagining my 17-year-old self walking in from the bus bay and fitting right in to MOST of the same classes - English, history, math Spanish, chemistry, etc, were still meeting within a few yards of where I last attended.

But I fear the present day experience in that school is sterile and unreal by comparison because almost all of the hands-on, real-world, content is extinct. Yeah, that includes the Electronics Lab. What did we have - at least a dozen work stations, each with variable power supplies, a VTVM, signal generator, and scope. No trace of it. I had been dabbling with electronics for 3 or 4 years before I got to High School, but - like Nigel in his Industrial Electronics course - that Lab was my first formal, structured, experience with electronics.

But it's not just the electronics that's missing. The machine shops, both wood and metal, are long gone. The 2-bay auto shop now stores athletic and groundskeeping equipment. Home Economics, which probably covered more acreage than the electronics lab but filled with cookstoves, ovens, and sewing machines, has been reduced to two apartment-sized kitchens (and the remaining space converted to classrooms).

It was almost like anything related to manually producing a product or service had been deemed unworthy of serious study.

I couldn't avoid thinking of a quote from Dr. John Gardner. I should go looking for a precise copy, but as best I recall it goes:

"A good plumber is of far greater worth than an inept philosopher. The society which scorns excellence in plumbing, because plumbing is a humble vocation, but tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an esteemed activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water."

​

Dale

 

[dchisholm]

. . . . I sit sometimes and try to think of the first thing I can remember...its an interesting exercise..try it you might be surprised. Then try to feel how you felt and let the you now melt away . . .

I have never deliberately attempted that exercise, but I am often amazed by the amount of detail I can remember from some long ago events, both significant and trivial . . . and the number of significant events whose very existence I can verify only because I have some photo, document, or testimony of a trusted person to confirm that it happened.

I can recall the house where I lived when I was 3, or a little younger. I can't describe it but I know it had an upstairs where another family lived, and a coal-fired furnace. Occasionally the smell of burning coal will revive a memory of going with my father to feed coal to the furnace, and take out the cinders to spread in the driveway. The front yard of that house had a "Christmas tree" - some kind of balsam or spruce, where a neighbor's cat liked to play.

I don't recall the very first day of school so much as being forced to pose for my mother's camera on the steps to the school. All I recall about High School graduation is an interminable wait in line to turn in the cap and gown, before I could go out to celebrate with friends.

It's puzzling what will trigger a memory you think is irrevocably forgotten, but comes flooding back with vivid details. And, as I mentioned, the insignificant details you retain while the fundamental details are gone. Personal photos and documents, and visiting the locations of old events (as Nigel related), can have those effects but sometimes the trigger is totally unrelated to you: a scene from a movie; a taste or smell or the way an object touches your skin.

And some vivid memories are fairly widespread among people, to the point of being almost universal. I can give VERY detailed accounts and descriptions of the 30 seconds before, during, and after my first kiss. Some details of University graduation, overshadowed by my frustration at the thought I was the only one there without a significant other. Standing to take the oath and receive the President's commission as an Air Force officer. The moment I first saw and met the girl who has been my wife for nearly 41 years - our first date that day - and the first kiss with her. I'm ashamed to say I recall almost nothing of our actual wedding service, except my elation at the end when we were introduced as Mr.-and-Mrs, and our guests stood to sing "Doxology" with us. And of course the mental and physical sensations, but especially the emotional intensity, of first-time sex between two virgins on our wedding night.

Other detailed memories are less pleasant but no less significant. Losing our first-born to birth complications. The fear and anxiety when our second child was born. The memory of holding our last child as he took his first breath was rather fresh in my mind when I held my father as he took his last breath.

Dale

 

[Tubelab_com]

I went to a technical high school in the late 60's. It was a large school of about 5,000 students. From them about 25 students each were selected through applications, testing, and teacher recommendation, for each of several 3 year long vocational training programs. There were classes for electronics, auto shop, commercial art, metal working, machine shop, cosmetology, construction, and woodworking. Each of these programs were intended to prepare a student for immediate employment in that particular trade.

I got into the electronics program, which was targeted to teach TV repair. The school actually got me my first job in a TV repair shop, at age 16, for $1.05 per hour. Less than 4 years later I would find myself employed at Motorola for $3.57 per hour, a career that lasted 41 years.

Due to the typical budget restraints the training material was quite dated, mostly Philco training books from the early 60's and Army training manuals. We also got regular donations from the local Air Force Base, and several local electronics shops. ALL of the hands on labs taught tubes! One of the Air Force donation boxes had maybe a thousand new in the box metal 6L6 tubes. I spent 3 years trying to melt them all!

The previous instructor had just retired, and was replaced by two people who had never taught before, so we all learned together. I could fix TV's as good as either of the instructors, but I was far more entertaining.....imagine a classroom where the teacher bet me (one of his students) a quarter that I could not make the outer metal shell on a metal 6L6 glow red! It took a while, and stunk up the whole classroom, but I won the quarter.

I graduated from that school in 1970. I went back several times until 1973 when I left Miami. At that time the 6 foot Tesla coil that we build still stood in the corner, but nobody dared plug it in.

I visited again in about 2000 to see that the school had finally been air conditioned, but all of the vocational classes had been cancelled except auto shop. They were deemed too expensive for the few students that benefitted. Auto shop only lived on due to donations from a few local auto dealer franchises like Auto Nation.

The web indicates that the 55 year old school is still operational, but I haven't been there in 15 years.

 

[dchisholm]

. . . . Due to the typical budget restraints the training material was quite dated, mostly Philco training books from the early 60's and Army training manuals. We also got regular donations from the local Air Force Base, and several local electronics shops. ALL of the hands on labs taught tubes! . . . .

Almost exactly the same things I experienced in High School electronics, 1966 - '69! I learned quite a bit from the Philco materials. I thought they were fairly well organized and the hands-on exercises were well integrated with the textbook presentations. Considering that in the early 1960's, transistors were still uncommon - if not rare - in commercial and consumer electronics, but by the time 1970 rolled around the vacuum tube had been pretty much relegated to a few specialized applications, it's no surprise that educational materials couldn't keep pace with the transition. My instructors (Mr. Mayer and Mr Lively) supplemented the (somewhat outdated) published materials by producing a fair amount of instructional material dealing with transistors and other solid state devices. As rapidly as the industry was changing, the instructors weren't very far ahead of their students when it came to learning and understanding solid state technology.

Educational funding in that era (late 1950's through the 70's) is an interesting discussion. Our ("baby boom") generation became the focus and dominant factor in MANY areas of society, culture, and public policy - marketing, entertainment, urban planning, housing, etc, etc, as well as education. Many facilities hadn't seen significant upgrades in 30 years. The persistent depression of the late 1930's, followed by the war years, hadn't provided a lot of "spare" money to spend on expanding public education. Nor did those historical periods produce many babies, so it was possible for schools to maintain traditional levels of performance and service without major budget changes.

I can't point to statistics that prove it, but my recollection is that we put a lot more money into educational facilities and equipment than into the people and organizations who could successfully and efficiently use them to educate students. It seems like we were always campaigning for a bond issue because we needed a new building, or major renovations to old ones. In my junior year of High School I was in a building only five years old, and already being expanded to accommodate an increasing student population. At the same time custodian services had been sharply reduced because the janitorial budget couldn't cover all of the recently constructed facilities. Teachers who wanted to maintain the previous levels of housekeeping tidiness had to either do it themselves, or locate student "volunteers". (I'm sure Mrs Perryman never appreciated the humor behind the incident when I exploited that situation. The opportunity was just too good to pass up . . . )

In the area of electronics, the U.S. government was sorely embarrassed by the Sputnik incident and other Soviet technical achievements (real, imagined, or hyped) of the late 50's. One reaction was an emphasis on education in applied technology. As you and I both experienced, the government would foot the bill to construct and equip a High School electronics lab . . . even though local districts were hard pressed to find truly effective instructors to man the facility. During the early 60's I think there was a policy, perhaps even a law, requiring military material disposal functions to identify items that had educational value, and offer them to public schools at low- or no-cost. Like your 6L6's I saw a lot of those components and equipment: a couple of WWII aircraft radios; boxes of resistors and capacitors, individually packaged for preservation in long-term storage; small groups of transistors, already obsolete by the late 60's, even if you COULD determine their characteristics from the proprietary part numbers they bore. For all of this bounty there was seldom a quantity of any single item that allowed each student in a class to have his own set of parts for assignments or personal investigation.

Wondering how many others on the Forum had similar experiences?

Dale

 

[Tubelab_com]

As rapidly as the industry was changing, the instructors weren't very far ahead of their students when it came to learning and understanding solid state technology.

I remember bringing an IC chip to class and showing the class and teacher how to hook it up and make it work. The chip was an RCA CA3020 that I had bought from the Allied Radio or Lafayette catalog. It was a 1/2 watt audio amp chip that ran from a 9 volt battery.

Our class also got some scrap boards from Coulter Diagnostics (blood counting machines, still in business as part of Beckman) that contained opamps, comparators, and RTL logic. I made a simple monophonic music synthesizer from the chips harvested (with a propane torch) from those boards.

This led to me dumpster diving behind Coulter every Friday night for more of these neat hi-tech parts!