true, but those were the major stressors in my work career. You know.....hurry up and finish that design.....too bad we will never put it in a product.
Not to worry Toooby , your best amplifiers are yet to come , nothing like some quit winter time to get some nice class-a tooobs ...
kt150 stuff keep you pretty warm ..... 🙂
kt150 stuff keep you pretty warm ..... 🙂
How old, your daughters, George?
Good use; oh yeah, retirement in dignity with peace. ...And breathing some fresh/clean air from them trees providing oxygen, and shelter.
People would have to meet first, and some would have to relocate, ...making some sacrifices here an there, that's the price to pay if you want to play.
* But it was more an idea, a dream than concrete reality.
That, is one of them concrete reality. ...Some music recordings are made like that; from various musicians who never met each other but contributed their part into the final recording. Yesterday it wan't possible.
Money is also pleasure. ...Spending it. But for that you do need some. 🙂
...And you can retire with none @ all. ...Only have yourself and the entire world around you.
I bet too.
Ideas, I got few Frank. ...It's the throw that is short. I don't think I got what it takes, ...balls of steel.
The day that you'll give that all up, being able to live without, will be a new day. ...With lots of freedom and spiritual gain and stronger live values. But also with its own consequences once in a while...
Because our surrounding world is one of paying our bills in time (or else), and not missing our doctor appointments (or else).
Freedom without money and health is tough to manage well...
And being self-sufficient is gaining more independence which in the long run is the return to our deepest source.
It's a disease, a virus. ...Being a slave to our own jail without an escape route.
You got it; that stuff remains with us for quite a while. We're like robots working for other robots, just like a big bunch of zombies with no direction home. ...I bet you enjoy much more your life @ home playing with your tubes and transistors and transformers and Japanese plants by the river near by, playing your guitars, hugging Sherri, laughing with your daughters, drinking pina coladas and martinis alcohol-free, swinging that axe around, and whatever else has no scheduling, no planning, no timing zone, and no paycheck attached to it (no boss).
* By the way, build that front porch while @ it. ...It is a part, a building block of a sane retirement state. ...You'll be real happy, and Sherri too, sitting and relaxing on your rockin' chair, and watching the wildlife around. ...Your daughters visiting will also appreciate. ...Get one of those shade umbrella too, the large type. ...For when that sun hits you right on the tube.
Here in the Great White North, in our igloos; we sure can use some tube warmth.
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<<>> Thoughts about retirement ... Enjoying life day to day, stress-free, trees growing, children too, and stay fit; mentally & physically.
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Hold on. I gave the USB DVD drive one final smack...and it copied all the files on one of the disks. The PDF's all open and the ni stuff unzipped. I am now "exiting all other programs" including this browser window to try an install. Wouldn't want to give MS an excuse to screw up😀
Only one daughter...bad punctuation on my part. She is 33, HS was a while ago. Some of her friends, I scared off, others, I made tube guitar amps for. My daughter was in the HS band, so our house was full of noise all the time. We had a room in the back of the house with a double bass drum set, a Roland JV1000 keyboard, a guitar amp and a couple of my guitars. There was someone there playing something...or everything, plus whatever they brought most any weekday after school. I gave away the crummy Brownsville guitar amp, but I still have all the other stuff stashed away.
I have 4 grand kids, unfortunately my daughter moved to Idaho, then Seattle about 10 years ago, so I don't see them often.
A lot of music is made that way today. In fact I have been sending DAW files back and forth with one of my friends back in Florida.
The one I saw was a music VIDEO. It showed a drummer, a bass guitar player, and two guitar players, all playing together in sync. The backgrounds were all different (one guy was in his backyard, others were in different studios), but otherwise it appeared as if they were all playing together.
We need to build the house first! The plans call for a back porch facing the creek out back. We will build a larger covered deck adjoining it later. Much better scenery than the dirt road out front. In the mean time the neighbors have a 20 foot octagon shaped gazebo out back about 300 feet from where the house will be built. I just got back from there......after busting up some concrete with a sledge hammer (fun stuff) I sat out there with an iced tea and watched the cat trying to catch a bird, then get herself out of the tree after the bird flew away......
Ah-ha ... so that's how people know you like them, you make something toooby for 'em ... 😉
That period was my reintroduction to building tube stuff. I started my electronics journey at about age 8 or 9 when my parents got a stereo and gave me the old Magnavox HiFi. I cut a guitar cord in half and twisted the wires to the wires in the Maggie's tone arm, and I had "built" my first guitar amp.
I built tube stuff out of junk TV's and HiFi's. Hey that stuff was free, solid state stuff was rare and expensive in the 60's. Sometime in High School, I started building solid state stuff. In fact the most powerful audio amp I have ever built was SS. It used 24 X 2N3773 (from a military junkyard) and made over 1200 watts. A lot of power for 1970. I made mostly SS stuff through the 70's, 80's and 90's. In fact when my daughter was in high school, I had Carver and Phase Linear stuff.
One of my daughter's friends wanted a tube amp, so I made the first "Turbo Champ". I think I made about a dozen of them in 3 years, and every one was different. I made one for myself using the 5X7 JBL car speakers I took out of one of my cars before trading it in. I didn't like it, it didn't ROCK. It was relegated to the back room practice amp duty, until one of my daughter's friends brought hid Gibson ES335 over. I must admit that it was a good match and did sound good, very clean and bluesy kind of good, so it became his.
I made a bunch of them, and I still don't have one. In fact I haven't seen any of them in several years.
I built tube stuff out of junk TV's and HiFi's. Hey that stuff was free, solid state stuff was rare and expensive in the 60's. Sometime in High School, I started building solid state stuff. In fact the most powerful audio amp I have ever built was SS. It used 24 X 2N3773 (from a military junkyard) and made over 1200 watts. A lot of power for 1970. I made mostly SS stuff through the 70's, 80's and 90's. In fact when my daughter was in high school, I had Carver and Phase Linear stuff.
One of my daughter's friends wanted a tube amp, so I made the first "Turbo Champ". I think I made about a dozen of them in 3 years, and every one was different. I made one for myself using the 5X7 JBL car speakers I took out of one of my cars before trading it in. I didn't like it, it didn't ROCK. It was relegated to the back room practice amp duty, until one of my daughter's friends brought hid Gibson ES335 over. I must admit that it was a good match and did sound good, very clean and bluesy kind of good, so it became his.
I made a bunch of them, and I still don't have one. In fact I haven't seen any of them in several years.
I retired about 2 years ago, and my wife will retire in the spring of next year. We have a cabin in western Maryland and the plan is to sell the place in Reston, VA and move there until we can figure out the next step. Our younger daughter is relocating to Portland, Oregon, so maybe the west coast is next, but we don't know yet.
But we know we need to start getting rid of stuff to make our immediate move easier. I've got an RMI keyboard stashed away that I need to either find a home for or else send to the landfill. It's got a 2" CRT driven by an 8085 CPU that generates waveforms in response to Fourier coefficients entered into a hex keypad--it was my senior project at UVA back in 1971. Any interest in the keyboard? Our cabin is in Western Maryland, about 1 mile from the WVA border. I'd gladly drive it up to the northern panhandle just to get it to a good home if you are interested. Way too heavy to ship, so it either finds a home or else joins the household garbage in the dumpster at our local transfer station.
It's just the keyboard and switches--no other electronics besides my own. But it's a real piano action with wood and felt, so it could be a nice start for a custom keyboard. RMI is an Allen organ spin-off...it's well made.
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Very nice.
The small ladder to give access to the deck is an extra special feature. 😀
The small ladder to give access to the deck is an extra special feature. 😀
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Interest, yes. Do I have a place to put it until my house is built? I doubt it. Can you give me some rough dimensions and guess at the weight. Is the keyboard still in the RMI case? If so which model. I want to Google a picture.
The 8085 didn't exist in 1971. I worked with the Motorola 6800. Preproduction chips were available in 1974. I think the 8085 came later. It was after the 8080, which came after the 8008.....and the 4004.
I'll have to dig it out. It's in a closet under our stairwell, back behind a lot of other stuff. It's very heavy--close to 100lbs. I think it's a prototype model 300a in the original case but without the cutouts for the switches and no electronics and no footswitches. I got it from someone who was working with Clark Ferguson at Allen organ. I don't know how he got it but I could probably find out. I think the case and keyboard are in good shape with little wear--I'll have to check.
I will need to get rid of it before next summer, so if that would be a better time I can keep it here until then.
Brain fart--wrong decade. I graduated with a degree in philosophy and then went back to "reform school" for the EE. I graduated from UVA in 1981, so the project would have been started in 1980. There's a cropped picture of the CPU board in the RE article I wrote that was published in '81: https://ia801702.us.archive.org/Boo...onics_December_1981_0055.jp2&scale=2&rotate=0
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If things go as planned, my house will be done by next summer. Construction is scheduled to start in September. A winter build on a friends house last year didn't go well at all. It took over a year to finish that house, but last winter was not typical.....we will see. Definitely let me know before scrapping it, but no need to dig it out now.
It sounds like a cool project, and far above the typical EE senior project. Especially in 1981. I set out to build a digital "harmonic synthesizer" back in the early 70's using RTL logic chips. My "top octave generator" was a whole board full of chips. I saved all the hand wired perf boards, but the gutted organ cabinet and keyboard was lost long ago, I don't even remember when or where.
We are going down the similar paths. I just retired from 41 years and had to reduce my collection by about 2/3 just to be able to move it all. There is "stuff" crammed into every room of this house, the garage is full, and we have an old modular home that is being used for storage. Over the past 5 years (I knew this was coming) I sold, gave away, or tossed over 90,000 vacuum tubes and about a ton of transformers and other parts.
It sounds like a cool project, and far above the typical EE senior project. Especially in 1981. I set out to build a digital "harmonic synthesizer" back in the early 70's using RTL logic chips. My "top octave generator" was a whole board full of chips. I saved all the hand wired perf boards, but the gutted organ cabinet and keyboard was lost long ago, I don't even remember when or where.
We are going down the similar paths. I just retired from 41 years and had to reduce my collection by about 2/3 just to be able to move it all. There is "stuff" crammed into every room of this house, the garage is full, and we have an old modular home that is being used for storage. Over the past 5 years (I knew this was coming) I sold, gave away, or tossed over 90,000 vacuum tubes and about a ton of transformers and other parts.