Don Lancaster's “Guru's Lair” Archive

Don was the hardware hacker before Makers became buzz-worthy. The most influential thing he said was that a Hardware Hacker must have a library, he quantified it as at least six feet of books, documentation and literature. Once you got that much you could start weeding out the less valuable material!

Few have contributed as much to understanding modern technology as Don Lancaster. Don educated a whole generation in the art of learning by doing. If you are seeing his work for the first time, it may not seem impressive. However, in their proper historical context, Don's contributions were without equal.

I grew up with his books and articles and visit his site periodically. I posted this a couple of weeks ago (my first HN contribution!) and it points to free downloadable Cookbooks he offers through his site.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22354822

https://www.tinaja.com/ebksamp1.shtml

I stil have several of his books within a few feet: the TTL Cookbook was an inspiration back in the day, followed the CMOS version and in particular "The Cheap Video Cookbook" when VT100's were mad expensive things.

The book that still get used on a moderately frequent basis is the "Active Filter Cookbook", still very relevant when some hacking with op-amps is required.

Oh, and as an oldie I like his style.

I bought both the TTL and CMOS cookbooks by Don Lancaster during my 20s, still have and love them, and spent so many nights building stuff thanks to their examples. Although they might appear outdated to young electronics enthusiats, I would strongly suggest newbies to get them and learn from them; you won't regret it as the knowledge gained there will help a lot also with more modern stuff such as the Arduinos etc.

One of my builds which would have been impossible without the stuff learned on those books was an ultrasound motion sensor built around IIRC a 4070 CMOS quad XOR gates chip: one gate worked as oscillator driving a TX ultrasound transducer, one as linear amplifier driven by a RX ultrasound mike, one as phase detector with its inputs connected to the oscillator and input mike, then one as buffer driving a led when an object was moving in front of the ultrasound capsules. I miss those years!

I found out that his TV Typewriter design pretty much was the basis for the Sinclair ZX80 video display. I wouldn't be surprised if even Woz took a nod in his direction with the video output on the early Apple computers.

Hard to believe my first Don Lancaster book was the RTL (Resister Transistor Logic) 1975 reprint. Much of what I know about hardware logic originates in these books.

His Apple II stuff was amazing back in the day.