I prefer this link myself...

Post #45,848 by Simon_Jester 7/16/02 11:39:11 PM Reply	I prefer this link myself... Oddly enough, Bull himself was not particularly militarist. He never saw military service or even owned a handgun. He was said to be generous and thoughtful. He just found something that he really loved doing. He consulted for everyone, but ran into trouble when he worked for the South Africans. The South Africans were having trouble in Angola at the time (the mid-Seventies). The communist government, aided by Cuban troops and Soviet artillery, was pounding their proxy soldiers to bits. Bull, with the implicit encouragment of the CIA, helped them design a new 155-mm howitzer with 50% more range than anything else at the time. He sold them gun barrels for it and thousands of shells. With the new guns, the South Africans were able to stop the Angolans cold. Then Carter was elected, and South Africa was no longer in favor. Bull was brought up on charges of illegal arms dealing. On the advice of his lawyer, he pleaded guilty and served six months in prison in 1980. [link\|http://world.std.com/~jlr/doom/bull.htm\| Source ]
Post #45,857 by Ashton 7/17/02 2:46:29 AM Reply	Then how about this - with a neat M$ jibe too: The Real pioneer of (critical pieces of) [link\|http://world.std.com/~jlr/doom/armstrng.htm\|Radio] This web host is an ordinary (?) non-IT engineer but he groks to fullness the essence of Corporate mindset and of Andy's epitaph.. Microsoft is a true reflection of Bill Gates' personality - the sleaziest, most unethical, ugliest little rat's ass the world has seen unto this time. -- Andrew Grygus (When you've achieved infamy early - your epitaph gets written early too)
Post #45,944 by a6l6e6x 7/17/02 10:29:05 PM Reply	Re: Thanks Ashton. I remember reading... some of this story many years ago in an IEEE periodical and hadn't thought of it since. Alex "Television: chewing gum for the eyes." -- Frank Lloyd Wright
Post #45,954 by Ashton 7/18/02 5:15:23 AM Reply	PBS did a piece on Armstrong a few years back. Maybe American Masters ? That photo with the first "portable" superhet beach radio was in it. May be available at the PBS video outlet; it was a nicely done bio of an irascible but honest prodigy. I think this article captures the sense of Armstrong's actually grokking FM, where the equations led to no sense of how you could Do that, practically. No question what kind of bastard he was dealing with in 'General' David Sarnoff - perhaps the epitome of vanity and a prequel to The Billy. Ditto Lee de Forest: the vanity without the talent to even understand how his 'audion' worked, nor the guts to thank Armstrong for explaining it! Creep. I recall seeing a film of a This Is Your Life smarmy tribute to de Forest... prolly in the '50s from appearances of the players. It was exactly like a M/Sloth "innovation" press conference; almost nothing said about deF was accurate.. but he ate it all up. My intro to big science electronics was via my boss and I (on a weekend) assembling a super-regen FM receiver with a simple slope-detector ... out of junk lab parts (and a box of Really old resistors from his junk box!). Bloody thing worked.. just like A. said it should. Amazing (to me then) to take circuits right out of textbooks and see them work! Getting local KPFA after switching it on - goosebumps. I began to think there might be something long-term to this 'lectronics stuff (but I was wrong again). Seems to have been lots of techno-rotters.. you can drive by the site of the first actual Tee Vee - Philo Farnsworth's lab in SF (ironically now housing a TV ads production company!) He too was screwed out of his clearly 'prior art' - by those famous 'Market Forces' which measure our hallowed succession of truly nasty bastards in expensive suits. Cheers, Ashton Helmholtz Tesla (with either a slope- or ratio detector: I detect little that is honest in most any Captain of Industry.. it's the Opposite of science or even 'science' -- success IS only about lying with a certain consistency.)

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