This morning I bring to you “Mr. Scary Guy” from an advert in one of my 1970s Practical Electronics magazines:
This advert was in nearly every edition at around that time. I wonder whatever happened to this guy, and whether he now has a different haircut.
In my adolescent years, I spent a lot of time fiddling around with electronics. I’d sit for hours in my room building oscillators, radios, multivibrators, Schmitt triggers, sparking devices and so on. At one point I built myself a nice little audio oscillator that I fixed into a wooden box. It had controls for frequency, frequency range, sine wave, square wave or triangle wave output, and volume. I had great fun with it, plugging the output into my old Solartron naval oscilloscope (that my Dad bought me at a surplus store on an epic expedition down to Dartford, south London, one weekend). In the city I lived in (St.Albans), there was a weekly market on Saturday, and one of the stalls was run by a chap who sold telephone switching gear that had been thrown out by the GPO, tools, and various other stuff. It was a treasure trove, and his prices were affordable even for me (I think I typically had half a crown to spend, i.e. 2/6, two shillings and sixpence, or about 25c in todays money, but it seemed a lot at the time). I remember once buying from him a rack mounting telephone exchange amplifier that was festooned with knobs, sliders and sockets and inside contained a mass of circuit boards with transistors, big electrolytic capacitors, diodes etc.. I spent many happy hours disassembling it and adding the components to my collection, to be used in upcoming projects. That sort of gear has a very particular electronic-y smell, which is one of the happiest smells in the world.
Here’s a real beauty of an analogue Sound Synthesizer, as it appeared (with construction details) in the February 1973 edition of Practical Electronics.
Just look at the knobs on that! This design was by the very great (in my mind at least) G.D.Shaw, who followed up a year later with a portable battery operated Synth called the MiniSonic. Here he is holding his baby [actually I learned later that this is not G.D.Shaw - JB]
Finally, I must show you a picture of a guy who is advertising an electronic component catalogue in the same issue of Practical Electronics as the MiniSonic:
This was the sort of photo I had to stare at as a boy while waiting for a haircut at the barbers.
