Ah, the Kingfish! I must fold. Man, we are old! :)

Post #31,143 by a6l6e6x 3/6/02 11:21:27 PM Reply	Ah, the Kingfish! I must fold. Man, we are old! :) You know I never connected Avery Fisher Hall with the Fisher hi-fi. So thanks for that tidbit. In the tube days, Fisher stuff was superb but too pricey for me. I drooled and then built a Heathkit. Now how many of our folks here, know about Heathkits. OT: Glad Moz the Lizard is working for you so far. I have purged all signs of Netscape from my system. Alex "People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid." -- Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
Post #31,145 by Ashton 3/7/02 12:43:43 AM Reply	Heathkit.. Note that its demise.. also signals the demise of lots of kids finding out how 'lectronics Really works - not to mention 'housewives' who assembled their own color Tee Vee. They may not have gotten even much into Ohm's law but, imagine the satisfaction.. The new Tee Vee? I built it! Fisher stuff - that was about the time I started doing 'audio consulting'. FM-200 with real Nuvistors! in the front-end. Capture ratios nearing 1 dB. (Recently acquired one of the RF, stereo generators, way too expensive then: Sound Technology ST-1000A. It's still perfectly calibrated w/ vanishing distortion, etc.) The last of the Heaths was as brilliant as the first - I have (two of!) their 'scope calibrators' = better specs than the HP, Teks (of a few years earlier). A nice risetime pulser with claimed 1 nS T_r, nearer 0.6 nS. Dunno who will use, fix the electronics of the present and future, as most kids take the EZ MBA basketweaving courses and eschew science. Innumeracy grows. Musta been that way in Atlantis too? :( Mozilla nicely converted my several mail folders, huge bookmarks. Maybe sometime I'll turn on jscript - just for the hell of it. Gotta explore the other featurez soon. Let it be STABLE (!!) Cheers, Ashton
Post #31,228 by a6l6e6x 3/7/02 2:07:34 PM Reply	Glad to hear Moz did OK with mail. I use Eudora so that's an uknown area for me. Alex "People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid." -- Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
Post #31,218 by admin 3/7/02 1:16:25 PM Reply	Heathkit... I built their TV, doorbell, motion sensor... lots of things. I used to get up on Saturday morning and solder circuit boards down in the basement while wearing my bathrobe. I actually lived 25 miles north of Heathkit's location. Was fun to go down there and look at everything. It was a sad day for me when they closed down. :-( Regards, -scott anderson "Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson..."
Post #31,227 by a6l6e6x 3/7/02 1:58:23 PM Reply	Re: Heathkit... Yes, it was sad when they closed shop. I'm still using their garage door opener, metronome, and the basic oscilloscope. My daughter has the "handed down" Heathkit walnut hi-fi cabinet. Alex "People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid." -- Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
Post #31,230 by Ashton 3/7/02 2:30:40 PM Reply	Especially sad: it wasn't due to lack of "quality" of their designs. They seemed to be about to incorporate the ideas of (the scope-cal example) into other basic test equipment, equalling the quality of HP et al -- not so much in fancy boxes, though they were also nice-enough: but in bang/buck with no apologies for the specs. Lack of demand killed them :( I see that as akin to the MBA love for the M$ onesizefitsall mindset, a morphing of nobody ever got fired by choosing IBM.. Companies as well as individuals could have profited from using their products, had bizness not entirely forgotten what, "cost effective" might mean. (Most were available assembled, too) So I saw their demise as We Lost and also.. an early symptom of the dumbing-down of all things. Fewer and fewer care to learn ~ how anything "works". Just... Consume. Can't set your VCR clock? - we'll have that difficult info transmitted to you! Can't figure out Why you might want to put certain 'files' into certain 'directories' ? Hah: we gots Windoze and automatic updates (and lock-in and data collecting about You) for ya.. Heath: another canary, dead in the mineshaft.. {sigh} Ashton

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