Forrest Mims, Radio Shack, and the Notebooks That Launched a Thousand Careers | Hacker News Reader

Forrest Mims, Radio Shack, and the Notebooks That Launched a Thousand Careers

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139 pointsblueatlas50 comments

Forrest Mims' mini-notebooks were horrible. They consisted of circuits cribbed from app notes -- but with the explanatory text removed. There's no way to understand how circuits work by reading the mini-notebooks. They were specifically designed to keep readers ignorant so they would have to buy more of the lousy books. I plodded through the 555 timer book when I was a kid and didn't learn a single thing. If only I had known about databooks at the time, I could have called Signetics and they would have sent me a free copy of a book with all the same circuits and detailed theory of operations. I might have become an electrical engineer instead of a programmer.

I believe Mims was also the author of the awful manual for Rat Shack's 100-in-one kit, which told the lie that a bipolar junction transistor is two diodes back-to-back. This is only true in the literal sense that a transistor has two P-N junctions; it's like if you roll down your car window and ask a passer-by for directions, and he helpfully tells you that you're in your car. It omits the key feature of the transistor, namely transconductance. And after reading it, I couldn't understand transistors for decades. Eventually I got hold of a college-level textbook which explained that when the base-emitter junction is forward-biased, the collector-emitter path acts like a resistor. Simple and clear, unlike Mims' writing which is designed to obfuscate and confound.

> Forrest Mims' mini-notebooks were horrible.

I used one of Mims' designs for a final project in an entry-level elecronics lab in college. I can't remember the specifics, but I think it was a little sender/receiver setup that transmitted audio over beam of light. When I couldn't get it to work after a bunch of troubleshooting, I showed it to the TA.

I'll never forget his incredulous expression. "Where did you get this? This resistor should be ten times this value. This shouldn't be an electrolytic capacitor. This. . . hell, I don't know what they're even trying to do here." And so forth.

Lol. I had that 100-in-one kit and remember the transistor non-explanation. I remember the kit being kinda fun but not nearly so much as programming. With the hardware kit it was almost impossible to make anything outside of the limited recipes provided; with software it was easy to have your own ideas and make something new.

i had that 100-in-1 kit too, and yeah, it was pretty non-accessible for a kid. got a few of the things to "work", but not any real understanding of how to make changes to anything to try something different. always thought it was my own limited brain. then we got a sinclair zx81... and i never looked at hardware again.

"There was a time when Radio Shack offered an incredible variety of supplies for the electronics hobbyist"

Bit of a distraction perhaps. Yep, incredible variety. All at the worst value for money known to mankind (at least in the UK).

Pack of three resistors. £1.95. Or was that £5.95? In 1970s or 1980. Enough bits for a simple op amp demo project £80, arm and leg.

If memory serves, they were an early adopter of custom currency. Instead of pricing the items on shelves they colour coded the cheap (lol) stuff. Red dot meant 1.95, blue 5.95 etc. There were only 5 or 7 price bands. I hated the place.

Thankfully in the back of an electronics mag were ads for a mysterious company "Maplin" that had a mail order catalogue. Everything was 10% or less of Tandy prices. Surprisingly Maplin was the one that lasted longest, though it was many years before they had a store nearby.

On to books.

The Radio Shack quick reference posters, cards, etc were brilliant. So I grabbed a a few indecipherable Radio Shack introductory books explaining various topics. They rarely seemed to explain anything. They were all shrink wrapped so you couldn't skim in store. I forget the authors though. I just remember quickly learning their own titles were something to avoid. I may have missed a dozen great authors thanks to that lesson. :)

The ones to get were the Babani books as they were 95p each for a 100 page paperback. Not shrink wrapped either! Thankfully long before the end of the Net Book Agreement (Price printed on cover by publisher) or Radio shack would have sold them for a tenner. Most of which seemed to be by a guy called R A Penfold. Don't ever remember reading an "about the author". Never did work out if he was a real author or a house pen name as he was impossibly prolific. Turns out yes, indeed, he was one guy. Who must have written hundreds of electronics, radio, and other hobbyist books.

As soon as you mentioned books I had a flashback to R. A. Penfold - and I was pleased you mentioned him. It didn't occur to me, at the time, it might have been a pen-name. As you say the author was very prolific.

I still have a couple of those books, though I moved away from hardware without delving too deeply. It's only recently I've started tackling hardware again, but these days I think of microcontrollers and microprocessors which can be programmed, rather than discrete components. At the time the most I'd have touched would have been the odd op-amp, and the 555.

Forrest's notebooks were the inspiration for my robotics notebook. I have most of them (although I've scanned them because that paper was just not going to survive!) and when I learned about lab notebooks in college labs I started keeping a notebook of my experiments in building microprocessor systems. For hobby work, having a notebook was especially helpful because I could quickly resynchronize what I was working on just by reading my notes. I also drew schematics, and noted weird discoveries (like you can run TTL even when the ground line is actually 12V as long as the VCC line is 17V :-).

The complete list is here: http://www.forrestmims.org/publications.html

These days though you sometimes have to figure out what the industry part number is for the radio shack number.

Most, if not all of the Forrest Mims "Engineer's Mini Notebooks" are up on the Internet Archive.

https://archive.org/search.php?query=Forrest%20Mims

Wow I really miss Radioshack. I needed a resistor to hack my my cars evaporation sensor. A $1000 job to replace the sensor (remove dashboard) or a $.20 resistor. Luckily found a shop not to far away.

You miss a specific form of Radioshack, which really is more you miss the distant past.

In my childhood we would go to Radioshack to pick up components required to repair our wood-enclosed CRT TV. Burnt resistors, that kind of thing. This was in the 80s and very early 90s. By the mid-90s Radioshack was already becoming largely useless.

Another thing I miss from the 80s: Local mom & pop hardware stores in my neighborhood generally had a quality hobby section with RC model kits and replacement parts. I would ride my bmx bike to get replacement control arms and alternative pinion/spur gears for my RC-10. By the 90s it required an hour drive by car to reach one of the few surviving hobby shops stocking any RC stuff.

At least Fry's Electronics stocks a good selection of electronics components, not that there's any near me.

There was a time rs made an attempt to go back to selling hobby components, but they were basically a cellphone company by then.

I don’t miss these shops in the UK. They were very expensive and literally had nothing in stock here. You’d regularly phone up, confirm stock, get there after a 20 mile drive and then they couldn’t find the stock or had filed the wrong resistors.

Now we have RS etc. Free next day delivery on everything. I regularly buy £0.20 of resistors at 7pm and they’re here by 10am next day.

Are you old enough to remember original Radio Shack? Or just lived near an unfortunately awful store?

It was their UK pricing maybe.

Everything was in a prepack. You didn't get prices on packs or shelves, you got colour codes that were pre-printed on the Radio Shack brand packs, so I'd guess they did that in US stores too.

Pack of three resistors, or three LEDs, or two electrolytics. £1.95. Or was that a fixed pack of 10 (including 8 values you didn't want) for £5.95? In 1970s or early 1980s. This when £1 Sterling was maybe $2.80

All US books were shrink wrapped, so you had only the back cover to go on.

If you mail ordered from Maplin in Southampton and spent £20, Radio Shack would be £400 for the same bits.

That was exactly it.

3-5 resistors (depending on wattage) 50p.

That was the price of a mars bar and can of Coke at the time.

Maplin 6p.

Yes. We had Tandy here which was the UK version of Radio Shack and was a pretty 1:1 match to the US Radio Shack stores. I'm old enough to have been a member of the Tandy battery club. Perhaps unfortunately.

The Tandy stores were pretty rubbish and overpriced. I've heard exactly the same complaints from people in the US at the time as well.

Tandy utterly failed to understand the UK's hobbyist culture. Maplin and the smaller mail order shops all advertised in the electronics monthlies and absolutely owned the market, because they gave the impression of being by-hobbyists-for-hobbyists and had huge customer loyalty.

Tandy turned up with their price gouging, and were literally laughed at. They managed to sell some TRS-80s - not a bad little computer - but aside from that most hobbyists were either indifferent or aggressively contemptuous because of their insanely greedy pricing.

Where Maplin understood how to build a loyal customer base by giving away free information in a massive catalogue, and creating projects that were challenging and fun, Tandy only ever seemed to see their customers as prey they could exploit.

It wasn't a good look then, and it's not a good look now.

Just curious, do you have a ~2007 Ford Fusion? Those cars are notorious for this particular issue.

I tried hacking my evap sensor with a resistor as you described, but for some reason I couldn't get it to work. Ended up spending $700 to fix it...

It's a 2010 actually, I did get it to work. Seems like i had to disconnect the battery.

My interest in electronics started when I was 11 or 12 and has led me to a 40+ year career in electrical engineering and programming. Thinking back, I attribute that, in somewhat equal parts, to Popular Electronics, the ARRL Ham Radio Handbooks, and Forrest Mims. I only built a few smallish projects (mostly dealing with blinking LEDs) but they were enough to keep my interest. Funny thing is that, after I graduated with my EE degree and got my first job, I haven't touched a soldering iron or designed a circuit since.

I still have my Mims books and still occasionally refer to them. They're awesome.

I loved these books as a kid. My grandpa got them for me, and a bread board, one birthday. He helped me build a power supply to use with the breadboard.

Same (from my uncle, who then worked at Martin Marietta on the shuttle tankers).

While I enjoyed reading through them and learned a number of concepts, his books helped demonstrate that I was not going to become an electrical engineer. I just didn't know what to do with it. Whereas, I was exposed to programming books at the same time (starting with David A. Lien) and was like a fish in water.

Also, RIP Radio Shack, though it was really a slow death by degrees.

Odd path here. I did EE and ended up writing software. All my peers who did mechanical engineering, control systems and law actually ended up writing software as well. All roads lead to software in 2018!

Loved this books and allowed me to build several of the projects.. (Including the very crappy LED oscilloscope). They where very non threatening to a 14 year old kid with a reduced command of the English language.

I've always been keen to understand more about electronics, but never know where to start - I flicked through a PDF of the Mims Notebook and it looks like a great reference, but without enough explanation for me.

Does anyone have any recommendations for a more "from zero knowledge" place to start learning?

A good next step up from Mims would probably be the ARRL Handbook. After that, or possibly concurrently with it, Horowitz and Hill's Art of Electronics 3rd ed. would be worth looking into.

I've heard good things about Practical Electronics for Inventors as well but haven't actually seen a copy.

'Getting Started in Electronics" is the Mims book for people who are learning from scratch. His notebooks are meant more as reminders for stuff you already know.

Visit adafruit site. They are very high quality and oriented towards teaching people electronics and basic microcontrollers. A bit pricy, but I find their boards, documentation, etc., to be consistently high quality.

Also his book "Understanding Digital Computers" (1978). The details (magnetic core and bubble memory) are dated, but the fundamentals (logic, gates, ALU, ...) are still relevant and clearly explained at a level that a school child should be able to understand.

I know "me too"s are kinda junk comments but Mims was so influential on me, and I know on so many of my friends, that I just had to post this "me too" comment.

Mims’ prose book Siliconnections is also a fantastic read; he talks about working in the electronics field around that time.

For better or worse, the mini-notebook is where I learned about using a ballast resistor for LEDs.

Stories about Mims always attract comments that make it clear that his writing inspired many to learn electronics. But to give some balance to the starry eyed impression left by the article and many such comments I suggest looking into his Wikipedia page [1] or any other source that talks about his creationist and climate change denialist views and how they have lead to controversy in his life.

I would also strongly recommend against his books for beginners now because even simple projects should at least consider alternatives based on microcontrollers and there are now much better and more comprehensive books that cover the basics that Mims covered and more modern alternatives. I would recommend The Art of Electronics [2] (older editions can be bought affordably) which incorporates learn- from- real- world- bad- design wisdom, and which has a sense of humor utterly lacking in Mims' writing.

1 (with controversy section) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forrest_Mims

2 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Electronics

As someone who has spent a lot of time both on learning electronics and understanding how to teach it, I would argue against this as bad advice.

The Art of Electronics is like a recipe book — it's a (whimsical, yes) set of reference designs to be referred to like templates for a design engineer. The Art of Electronics is not a well-suited recommendation for a beginner or novice.

Furthermore: I have spoken to Forrest Mims (disclosure: the discussions I have had with him were in the process of creating circuitclassics.com. That said, I have not met him personally.) The conclusion I came to was that his personal beliefs do not affect and have no bearing on his technical work.

(Broadly, I do not understand why this man is so hounded for his particular personal beliefs.)

It is true that hundreds of thousands of engineers launched their careers after being exposed to his books, that they are quite good at this, still relevant — and probably the only book on electronics to sell over 1M genuine (and many more untrackably via unauthorized reproduction etc.) copies.

Different people learn in different ways. Unlike most people apparently I credit Mims with delaying my taking up electronics. I found his books a complete turn off when I was young - painfully unimaginative and boring. Mims books were the only books available at Radio Shack and in the US, Radio Shack for decades before hacker spaces was in most places the only place to begin to tinker with electronics. The high number of Mims books sold has a lot to do with those decades of "monopoly". The Art of Electronics is what worked for me and many others and I have three hard bound copies that are falling apart from overuse. There may be simpler, fewer- topics-covered alternatives that would be better for very young readers, but AoE is what most teachers in particular that I know swear by.

I have fond memories of his book and his writings. I was rather stunned that somebody so intelligent would be so willingly not so in other areas. No interest attacking him for it, but just, "Wow. really?"

We all have our quirks, don't we.

I don't have a dog in this fight, but nothing I've read by him shows any indication of being willfully unintelligent.

Believing in Creationism is being willfully unintelligent.

One can be a Christian and not be a creationist -- that's a choice.

You're saying "willfully unintelligent" as if he's explicitly trying not to be intelligent. But that's the opposite of what's going on. He's examined the science and he sees problems with it. He's heard the counter-arguments, and he isn't convinced, because of what he sees as a lack of evidence.

This is the same kind of fundamental misunderstanding that separates (for example) a white supremacist from one who is not. The general idea is that the former is refusing to reason, examine, or use logic. But if you talk to a white supremacist or neo-Nazi at length, you find that they have nuanced, complex, logical explanations for their beliefs. They may be wildly inaccurate, but that isn't to say they didn't put thought into it. Not only that, but their positions are bolstered by the fact that there's basically no way to completely disprove them, because it would require observing nature over millennia, or having records we just don't have.

Calling them willfully unintelligent not only misunderstands their reasoning, but it questions their motives. It's not just a false observation, it's an accusation. This moves the conversation from "I don't think you're right" to "you're a bad person". And I think that's at the core of how political and ideological discourse is so rotten today.

Sigh. You went to effort to make your case but I don't buy it (and resent your conclusion of effectively blaming me for the failure of discourse today).

> You're saying "willfully unintelligent" as if he's explicitly trying not to be intelligent

No, I did not. He has access to the science and he also has a religious tract. He chooses to treat that religious tract as an inerrant literal depiction of the creation of the world.

Those are competing thoughts and "willfully" means that he made a choice.

And "willfully" is kind of tricky here, because it would not surprise me if he was raised in a Christian household that effectively brainwashed him into these beliefs.

>And I think that's at the core of how political and ideological discourse is so rotten today.

And I disagree. I think a huge part of the problem is religious fundamentalism and a rejection of science.

Edit: oh, and neo-nazis and white supremacist are bad people m'kay?

> (and resent your conclusion of effectively blaming me for the failure of discourse today).

Well, I apologize. I'm not intending to blame you for anything.

> He chooses to treat that religious tract as an inerrant literal depiction of the creation of the world.

According to an article I read about him, that doesn't appear to be the case. https://books.google.com/books?id=hSsEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA40#v=one... Third column, halfway down: "Mims did not become a Bible literalist." etc

> Those are competing thoughts and "willfully" means that he made a choice.

According to the article, Mims came to his conclusions after scientific study, not from growing up with a bible and deciding to just go with what he learned first. He looked at fossil records (among other things) and decided they weren't good enough to explain things without some extra force, and "chose" an intelligent designer as that force.

> it would not surprise me if he was raised in a Christian household that effectively brainwashed him into these beliefs.

He's a Texan, so I'm sure he was raised around Christianity, but he was actually an evolutionist before he became a science writer.

> I think a huge part of the problem is religious fundamentalism and a rejection of science.

In this case, science brought him to God. It would be funny if the public response and effect on his career wasn't so sad.

Thank you for the civil dialog in what could be a very contention discussion.

If Mims was being truly scientific about the Bible then that would include looking for finding falsifiability in the literal truths of the Bible. (Clearly I'm not religious and my take on that book is that it is, at best, a collection of inspirational stories -- not documented fact).

I respect each individual's right to have their own relationship with "God", including believing in things that I think are, dare I say it, stupid.

Scientific American did the wrong thing to fire him, but instead should have had a very clear firewall to ensure that they respected his personal beliefs and would not be associated with them.

> I was rather stunned that somebody so intelligent would be so willingly not so in other areas.

Judging by the Wikipedia article, he's Christian. Which means creationism is a part of his belief systems. As for climate skepticism, hard to say, though I am curious about one thing. Wikipedia mentions him doing a lot of atmospheric research, hand has some pretty charts near the end - charts that, to my layman's opinion, should show a rising trend (due to correlation between water vapour and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere), not a steady one. Could anyone comment on that and their relevance?

> Which means creationism is a part of his belief systems

This is only true for some doctrinal subsets of Christianity, and it's rare in European christian communities.

Far weirder to find someone who's innovated in atmospheric research - a great little paper on how to determine atmospheric water content with a $10 IR thermometer - who doesn't believe in climate change.

(https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/2011BAMS3215.1 if you want the paper)

(Broadly, I do not understand why this man is so hounded for his particular personal beliefs.)

Mims's beliefs came to the forefront several years ago (probably more like 20 at this point) when he was under consideration to take over editorship of the 'Amateur Scientist' column in Scientific American. This column isn't too well-known today, but it was hugely influential from the WWII years through at least the 1970s. It regularly featured experiments in all sorts of areas, from physics and chemistry to meteorology to natural history and archaeology.

I don't remember how the editors at SciAm found out that Mims was a creationist, but when they did, they rescinded the offer. There was a great deal of controversy among the magazine's readership at the time. The decision seemed prejudicial at best. Even without being religious, it felt like Mims was getting a raw deal.

I originally fell into that camp myself, but the events and trends that have taken place since then make me inclined to support the magazine's decision. If it was true that Mims's faith required him to deny basic elements of geological history and biological evolution -- and apparently it was -- then it's hard to see how he could do that particular job effectively.

It's a real shame, because it was otherwise the perfect job for him. Mental illness sucks, especially when it's voluntary.

Does that have anything to do with his ability to inspire people to do something with their lives? We're headed down this dangerous path where it seems we need to be able to vouch for every aspect of a person's life before we're allowed to celebrate anything they've done. People can do amazing things. And they can be assholes. And most of the time they're both.

I say this every time this is mentioned but Mimms actually did some brain damage to the budding electronics engineers. The books were cute but left people with a head full of things to be unlearned. This screwed up a number of my fellow students when they hit university. In fact our lecturer of the day, while drinking in the student union with us, described the Mimms books using language I can’t repeat here.

I actually started with 1st edition Art of Electronics Laboratory Manual back in the 1980s before I even went to university. That was in all incarnations total gold. It’s a tutorial guide rather than the textbook format of the main book.

In this day and age, Make Electronics (this will teach you which end of the soldering iron is hot) followed by TAOE is the way to go. Harry Kybett / Earl Boysen also produce an excellent book.

Electronics is vastly more complicated (and interesting) than cutting and pasting knowledge which is what you end up with from Mimms.

I found the Mimms 555/556 book to be a perfect source of copy/paste material to do the blinking lights “hello world” hardware equivalent.

Most programmers start off copy/pasting hello world; they don’t generally start off with accumulators and indirect addressing modes.

> creationist and climate change denialist

Unfortunately, it's not exactly an uncommon problem.

https://theness.com/index.php/creationists-mechanical-engine...

https://scienceblogs.com/tfk/2007/11/11/the-salem-hypothesis...

http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/creation/thermo_patterson...

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