all kinds of level of intelligence.
I do my best to bring the average down...
First digital device: I paid something like $120 for my the first TI handheld calculator in 1972 - got the bucks by mowing lawns and picking up driving range golf balls. What was that called - a TI-2500? Our high school computer science class used paper tape and card readers to input program code and data - as did my early undergrad classes. The first group I worked with in grad school built computer interfaces for instruments such as spectrometers and electrochemical devices. My first project involved the development of a digital optical feedback system to keep the intensity of a spectrometer light source constant, using a PDP-8a. I then got into mass spectrometry and worked with one of the first computerized mass spectrometers, a VG MM-15. Anyone out there cringe when I say "Diablo disc Drive"? I also helped develop a high resolution field desorption mass spectrometer and buillt a digital control and acquisition interface for it.
After grad school, I did environmental analysis for a couple of years and went retro - I built and optimized an analog tuning circuit for a digitally controlled mass spectrometer. The digital logic was lousy so our team disabled it and built an analog box that improved sensitivity by about 100X. That allowed us to understand the lens interactions well enough to go in, edit the logic and return the system to digital control - except that it then worked! We sold the mods to the instrument manufacturer. After that, I got into microscopy and surface analysis for the next 20 years.
During my time in surface analysis, I helped build a global team that brought high resolution digital imaging to our instrumentation. We were for the most part using commercially available modules to replace low resolution digital acquisition units. At that time PCs really sucked for digital imaging so we subverted our management edicts and brought in Mac and Sun workstations by getting distributors to sell them to us as "acquisition control units" because our IT would only allow computer purchases through their guidelines and Macs were verbotten. But the Macs worked great and we managed to keep them on the network up until XP arrived and by then IT had eradicated the last Appletalk networks. Fortunately, PCs had improved dramatically by that point and we made do just fine.
The five years I spent in electronic materials was a blast. Most of my time was spent using secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) to look at 3-D distribution of elements in devices and also organic and polymeric materials at the interfaces of multilayer builds. So for example, if you run Vcore a bit too high and your CPU dies, you can look at the damage to the transistor by SIMS because it is sensitive enough to see migration of components as a function of position within the device. I found the technology involved in modern device fabrication to be really fascinating.
Since then I've been doing some new stuff, working in a team that builds their own instrumentation for measuring airborne pollutants and going into the field to monitor the stuff our cars spew. I'm also trying to get a couple of small businesses going and hope to be working for myself within the next year or two. I'll probably end up back eating mac and cheese again before that happens.
I've done many builds at work, some pretty exotic but just recently got into building my own PCs for home when my kids wanted better gaming performance. Since then, three AMD S939 builds:
-A8N32SLI/4400+/1800XT/OCZ DDR500. This is a video editing box that games well enough when our kids have a friend over. I've got a TB of storage and that's not enuf.
-DFI LP nF4 UT/Opty 146/1900XT/OCZ Platinum DDR400. My older son's game box. He's proud as hell and he worked hard to pay for it.
-DFI 3200/Opty 170/XFired 1900XTs/mushkin Redline DDR500. My game box. The younger son uses it more than me. I love this rig!
I'm acquiring parts for a Conroe build. I have the case (Lian Li 60B Plus2), power supply (mushkin 650), HSF (Arctic Cooling F7P) and HD (WD 150GB Raptor). Still shopping RAID cards because I plan to stuff this thing with TBs of HDs for my photo and MP3 library. Totally uncertain on which Core 2 Duo CPU, but probably 6600 or above. Plan to wait a few months for the mobo picture to clear up, then look for some kind of combo deal. Probably mushkin RAM.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram