The Art of Electronics - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: alanb
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 25, 2013, 10:03:52 am
content: Anyone wanting to buy a copy of the Art of Electronics should look at Abebooks. I have just purchased a copy from a dealer in India for £20 inclusive of DHL delivery to the UK. The best price that I could get from a UK supplier was about £60.

author: GK
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 25, 2013, 11:04:52 am
content: I got my copy on Abebooks for $5 AUD plus 15 or 20 dollars shipping from the USA, along with the old classic textbookThe Art of Digital Design (an introduction to top-down design)for $1 plus postage. With the help of the latter, when the construction of my analog computer is complete, I'm going to start on a PDP8 replica. O0

author: camallison
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: June 25, 2013, 04:24:15 pm
content: Thanks for the tip off - as you say, far below UK prices, delivered, and the guy still makes a living.Camallison

author: alanb
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 25, 2013, 05:05:16 pm
content: I have noticed that on the back cover of the book it says 'This edition is for sale in South Asia only, not for export elsewhere'So it is probably a case of the publishers maintaining the high cost in certain countries.

author: Bored@Work
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 25, 2013, 05:44:46 pm
content: Yes, publishers have a policy to milk the cows in the west harder. The issue made it in front of the US supreme court, where a certain publisher got kicked hard in the butt for trying to prevent gray imports of his books:http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/thai-student-protected-by-first-sale-supreme-court-rules/

author: SeanB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 25, 2013, 06:12:24 pm
content: GK, I saw some Russian clones of PDP11 chips on Ebay recently, they look very nice in the Beryllium ceramic housings ( so do not grind them up), perhaps you should buy some of them to use.

author: dfmischler
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 25, 2013, 07:23:27 pm
content: Quote from: SeanB on June 25, 2013, 06:12:24 pmI think this misses the point of "doing it as a learning experience". Anyway, PDP-8 architecture is very different from PDP-11 architecture, so the chip to use for a high integration PDP-8 would be the Intersil IM6100 (if you can find one). It is also my understanding that at least some of the Russian "PDP-11 clone" chips are not quite compatible enough to run an actual DEC PDP-11 operating system without software changes (memory management?).I used to own a PDP-11/73, but I got rid of it when I moved in 1999. I don't think I had actually run it since 1991 or so which is about when people stopped paying me to work on software for their PDP-11's.

author: MasterOfNone
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: June 25, 2013, 09:30:37 pm
content: Thanks Alan,I never had my own copy since there was one floating around at work. But at that price I couldn’t resist.

author: GK
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 26, 2013, 03:13:59 am
content: I should mention that my copy of TAOE was a used one. Last time I looked there was a dozen or so copies listed on Abebooks from international sellers with the actual book price less than the cost of postage.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Quote from: SeanB on June 25, 2013, 06:12:24 pmThe only place I plan to use IC's is in the memory. Even if I could find a large enough quantity of NOS ferrite toroids I think trying to thread several k of core memory would sap my will to live. The rest will be discrete transistor circuitry.

author: SeanB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 26, 2013, 07:24:54 pm
content: Yes, wiring up a ferrite core is not a good thing, even just rewiring a 16x16 array was not a fun thing. there was a replacement unit made for it that was pin compatible, using a 6116 ram and a Dallas battery manager along with a CR2032 cell as back up power. rather overkill for replacing a 32 bit memory, but as the original core driver chips were made from unobtanium and obsoletium it was the only thing if they died. Paperwork was a simple 200 page form to fill out, but luckily we had a photocopier to make the 3 copies required, along with a lovely typewriter and a lot of ribbons. Whole sections were luckily " Not applicable in this application".

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 26, 2013, 07:30:26 pm
content: If you want to feel lucky I just put two ring core memory modules onto Ebay (look in the buy/sell/wanted section).

author: SeanB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 26, 2013, 07:56:05 pm
content: Core would make a nice wall panel, but I want the whole missile computer......