Obiturary for Don Lancaster

From Don's "Incredible Secret Money Machine":

a Final thought

Many years ago, I was attending a folk concert. The opening act was a single and an unknown flute player, performing in front of the closed stage curtains. His job was to warm up the audience for the high priced help that was soon to follow. He was good. Very good. But as he went along, the music started getting strange and finally downright weird. He was playing chords on his flute, along with notes with unbelievably strong tonal structures. Eventually, the music turned into bunches of Impossible sounding and god-awful squawks. Almost all of the audience got bored and restless as the music seemed to deteriorate. Just then, I happened to notice a friend beside me who had played in and had taught concert band. He was literally on the edge of his chair with his mouth open. He briefly turned to me and said very slowly, ''You can't do that with a flute. It is not possible." Of the thousands of people in the audience, at the most only five realized they were now witnessing a once-in-a-lifetime performance involving the absolute mastery of a very difficult musical instrument. To nearly everyone else, It sounded like a bunch of god-awful squawks. Always play for those five.

- Don Lancaster Thatcher, AZ

Don Lancaster was an engineer that wrote many articles but what he is really known for is the TV Typewriter which allowed normal TVs to be used as terminals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_Typewriter

His techniques were used in computers like the Apple 1 and Sol-20

I grew up reading his "Ask the Guru" columns in Computer Shopper and loves all the creative ways he came up to use PostScript. His hardware hacker articles were also great. He will be missed.

Very influential to me and anyone around my age and demographic seeking technical knowledge and wisdom.

Here is Don's web site.

I always liked his insights to Postscript and his view on Hydrogen.

https://www.tinaja.com