Lately, I’ve been on a tech nostalgia kick. For example, I’ve been buying old software from eBay and reliving them on virtualized Windows 95 and Windows 2000 machines. Along with software, I’ve also been looking at really old technical books. For example, stuff by Alan Holden; they’re absolute gems.
While reading Alan’s book about growing crystals, he talks about how substitutional impurities is being currently being researched to dope silicon crystals – which will revolutionize computers by replacing vacuum tube technology. I was super confused until I remembered the book was published in the 1960s.
But the most prized oldie content of all: old Radio Shack electronics books! Specifically, the Radio Shack series by Forrest M. Mims III called Engineer’s Mini-Notebook. They’ve been long out of print, but they’re absolutely timeless. And I recently found a collection of them as PDFs hosted online here at wordradiohistory.com.
https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Company-Publications/Radio-Shack/
These are small books, about 25 pages each. They cover electronics and science, and they’re turning into rare collector’s items. Before the Arduino, the maker movement, the internet, or any such newfangledness, this was a lot of people’s gateway into hobbyist electronics. They’re published on a graph paper background with illustrations and text that are drawn by hand.
