Don Lancaster has died

I loved his TTL Cookbook. As a kid in the '70s a small breadboard, 9V battery + 7805 regulator, and assortment of chips, wires, and LEDs kept me amused for hours. Little did I know that I'd put a lot of that to use in a career that wound up in the physical sciences as opposed to electrical engineering.

I would take my kit with me on family trips. Back in those days I could put them on an airplane tray table and pass the long hours taking ideas from the Cookbook and expressing them in hardware. I visited his tinaja.com site regularly and even posted about it to HN although to almost no response.

Farewell Mr. Lancaster, you will be missed.

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

Another luminary passes. Thank you, Mr. Lancaster.

Although I was introduced to him through his electronics books, I think it's no exaggeration to say that of all the books I've read, it was "The Incredible Secret Money Machine" that had the largest influence in my life.

Too many years ago, when I was getting ready to start my new business, I read pretty much every business book I could lay my hands on. Although easily the shortest, "The Incredible Secret Money Machine" was the best of them by a longshot. It distills fairly commonsense business advice into a short collection of concentrated wisdom, and tailors it for the one-person venture. I think part of the value is that is isn't an academic treatise on entrepreneurship. It's more like a short writeup on what worked and didn't work for Don's own business ventures.

I think that in every business mistake I've made, I can point to a page in that book where he said outright not to do whatever I did.

I tried to explain to my wife why Mr Lancaster's use of the phrase: "The Postscript general purpose programming language" was a sign that he was even nuttier than me.

Too much backstory to explain, alas. He inspired me by demonstrating that things were worth doing just because they could be, even when it probably wasn't the best idea. The scrap electronics sales and descriptions on his site were a treat, too.

RIP, and many thanks for the inspiration.

I used to read his articles in the old Popular Electronics as well as reading some of his books. I even built a couple of his simpler projects. I credit him with fanning my enthusiasm for electronics which ultimately led to getting by BSEE and MSEE degrees and having a 43 year career here in Silicon Valley. Thanks, Don.

In the Incredible Secret Money Machine, one of his tips was to cut off the power cord to your TV. (Pre Internet era!) The solid advice to not let yourself get distracted is invaluable. And harder than ever in today's world.

He also welcomed people contacting him directly with questions. Amazing. (Derek Sivers does than now: amazing).

RIP. His TTL and CMOS cookbooks have been of huge help in the late 80s and early 90s with no Internet available. They're still relevant today and highly recommended, especially for learning, since you can't teach the basics to a kid using an Arduino, although you can use it to simulate them later in software.

His web page at [1] contains a lot of interesting stuff. Better mirror it before it vanishes.

1 - https://www.tinaja.com/

Was just on his website last month to see that he was up to his usual activities and read a couple papers. (His explanation of bicubic pixel resampling is on of the more intuitive ones)

It appears he knew something might have gone wrong around the end of May, in which he asks readers to archive his work:

>A situation has limited our ability to post daily news and reduced our ability to provide new content. We hope to continue as best we can and have added three sysops. We are also working on providing new phone shortcuts.

>Meanwhile, please upload as many of our files to the widest possible range of historical archive preservation sites. as you can.

>Backup 128 GB USB copies remain available on our abeja eBay site.

Very inspirational for people of my generation looking to learn everything about computers. An early fount of knowledge through his prodigous publishing. I personally learned a lot about hardware and postcript among others from Don.

Years ago people started 3DPrinting with hot glue guns on a square-cube frame. Don wrote it up as a "Santa Claus Machine" because it could deliver whatever you asked for. That caught my attention and I'm sure there were others that picked up on it. I looked at his column as little fires that kept my imagination going. He was a tremendous help to my career.

Sad to hear. Black stripe for us hardware folks. What an inspiration.

Author of TV Typewriter Cookbook, Cheap Video Cookbook, and many other electronics books.

It's from Don Lancaster's columns in Computer Shopper (yes, Computer Shopper had articles, it wasn't all ads) that I learned Postscript was a real programming language. He used to describe writing Postscript code to make figures, as that was often easier than to use the primitive drawing programs at the time.

RIP Don. I still have many of his books , some purchased in the 80s The TV typewriter immediately comes to mind.

I have always been a huge fan of Don Lancaster's wizardly writing about PostScript, who not only regularly published in Computer Shopper, but also generously ran a free PostScript help line at his own personal phone number. But Woody Baker was by far his biggest most enthusiastic fan of all (and highly eccentric in personality and coding style), and he would regularly extol and evangelize Don Lancaster's virtues and ideas on comp.lang.postscript.

Once around March 4 1990, I gave Woody Baker some feedback on his comp.lang.postscript faq, including the suggesting that he might consider leaving Don Lancaster's personal phone number out of it, but he replied:

>Again, I want to thank you for your contributions. You and D. Cortesi have been most helpful. The two of you gave me very in depth feedback. I have moved almost all the editorializing to the end. I have moved the style stuff to the end. As for DON LANCASTER, I left his phone number in. Don publishes it regularly in the computer shopper, as a free PostScript help line. He is self-employed, and a widely published Author, for TAB books among other things. He says he averages 80 helpline calls a day. He also sells programs and books that he is self publishing. I can assure you, he won't mind at all.

Woody loved to talk in depth about how amazing and inspirational Don Lancaster was, and defend his well deserved honor and reputation whenever anybody criticized his work.

http://computer-programming-forum.com/36-postscript/ff79f7dd...

>True. Don lives in an APPLE II world. You are wrong, however in certain statements. He has (unfortunatly) mentioned what FLXPROC does. It happens to be critical to certain things, that several consultants are working on here and there. He knows enough not to blab some things, and jerk work out from under individuals (at least some of the time). Don has dug pretty deeply into certain areas of PS, and I have dug deeply into other areas of PS. Don is first and formost a writer. He's self employed, and extremely intellegent. I am first and formost a software engineer, and secondly a writer. I tend to write, however for clients. I'm confident that I know what FLXPROC does, and what it is good for. And I'm sure Don does also. I more or less told him about FLXPROC and he more or less told me what it does. After first quarter 1990, some things will be essentially worthless as consulting info, and will rapidly become public knowlege. I don't applogize for keeping the lid on some things. I'm a bit of a mercenary in a way. I like consulting.

>Cheers

>Woody

Their great respect was mutual:

https://archive.org/stream/Ask_the_Guru_v1

https://archive.org/stream/Ask_the_Guru_v1/Ask_the_Guru_v1_d...

>Don Lancaster's ASK THE GURU Selected reprints

>Copyright c. 1987 by Don Lancaster and Synergetics, Box 809, Thatcher, AZ 85552. (520) 428-4073

>Electronically self-published using the Apple //e computer and the LaserWriter Plus. All graphics were done in their entirety by ProDOS Applewriter 2.1.

[...]

>I don't think I was ever more amazed when Woody Baker of The Copier Store mailed me back one of my very own laser printed business cards — redone in real ink in an almost "embossed" gold! Turns out Woody had found an older Omnicrom machine scunging around unsold in the back of his warehouse and fired it up. Lo and behold, the instant conversion of any toner image to real ink in stunning colors!

Example 10 of Don Lancaster's Postscript Show & Tell beautifully illustrates how an Omnicrom printer works:

https://www.tinaja.com/glib/psnt.pdf

>Example ten -- What appears hear as a mild-mannered Postscript technical illustration is really the secret of full color laser printing.

>Omnicrom sheets are real ink applied to a carrier. You place the sheet in contact with your toner image and then run it back through the fusion rollers a second time. The ink gets fused over the toner.

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