7 ms·

Forrest Mims, Radio Shack, and the Notebooks That Launched a Thousand Careers

139 points by blueatlas 8y ago

tingletech 8y ago
I loved these books as a kid. My grandpa got them for me, and a bread board, one birthday. He helped me build a power supply to use with the breadboard.
- gavinpc 8y ago
  Same (from my uncle, who then worked at Martin Marietta on the shuttle tankers). While I enjoyed reading through them and learned a number of concepts, his books helped demonstrate that I was not going to become an electrical engineer. I just didn't know what to do with it. Whereas, I was exposed to programming books at the same time (starting with David A. Lien) and was like a fish in water. Also, RIP Radio Shack, though it was really a slow death by degrees.
  - setquk 8y ago
    Odd path here. I did EE and ended up writing software. All my peers who did mechanical engineering, control systems and law actually ended up writing software as well. All roads lead to software in 2018!
dreamcompiler 8y ago
I still have my Mims books and still occasionally refer to them. They're awesome.
le-mark 8y ago
Wow I really miss Radioshack. I needed a resistor to hack my my cars evaporation sensor. A $1000 job to replace the sensor (remove dashboard) or a $.20 resistor. Luckily found a shop not to far away.
- arbuge 8y ago
  Just curious, do you have a ~2007 Ford Fusion? Those cars are notorious for this particular issue. I tried hacking my evap sensor with a resistor as you described, but for some reason I couldn't get it to work. Ended up spending $700 to fix it...
  - le-mark 8y ago
    It's a 2010 actually, I did get it to work. Seems like i had to disconnect the battery.
- setquk 8y ago
  I don’t miss these shops in the UK. They were very expensive and literally had nothing in stock here. You’d regularly phone up, confirm stock, get there after a 20 mile drive and then they couldn’t find the stock or had filed the wrong resistors. Now we have RS etc. Free next day delivery on everything. I regularly buy £0.20 of resistors at 7pm and they’re here by 10am next day.
  - acct1771 8y ago
    Are you old enough to remember original Radio Shack? Or just lived near an unfortunately awful store?
    - setquk 8y ago
      Yes. We had Tandy here which was the UK version of Radio Shack and was a pretty 1:1 match to the US Radio Shack stores. I'm old enough to have been a member of the Tandy battery club. Perhaps unfortunately. The Tandy stores were pretty rubbish and overpriced. I've heard exactly the same complaints from people in the US at the time as well.
      - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
        Tandy utterly failed to understand the UK's hobbyist culture. Maplin and the smaller mail order shops all advertised in the electronics monthlies and absolutely owned the market, because they gave the impression of being by-hobbyists-for-hobbyists and had huge customer loyalty. Tandy turned up with their price gouging, and were literally laughed at. They managed to sell some TRS-80s - not a bad little computer - but aside from that most hobbyists were either indifferent or aggressively contemptuous because of their insanely greedy pricing. Where Maplin understood how to build a loyal customer base by giving away free information in a massive catalogue, and creating projects that were challenging and fun, Tandy only ever seemed to see their customers as prey they could exploit. It wasn't a good look then, and it's not a good look now.
femto 8y ago
Also his book "Understanding Digital Computers" (1978). The details (magnetic core and bubble memory) are dated, but the fundamentals (logic, gates, ALU, ...) are still relevant and clearly explained at a level that a school child should be able to understand.
mkstowegnv 8y ago
Stories about Mims always attract comments that make it clear that his writing inspired many to learn electronics. But to give some balance to the starry eyed impression left by the article and many such comments I suggest looking into his Wikipedia page [1] or any other source that talks about his creationist and climate change denialist views and how they have lead to controversy in his life. I would also strongly recommend against his books for beginners now because even simple projects should at least consider alternatives based on microcontrollers and there are now much better and more comprehensive books that cover the basics that Mims covered and more modern alternatives. I would recommend The Art of Electronics [2] (older editions can be bought affordably) which incorporates learn- from- real- world- bad- design wisdom, and which has a sense of humor utterly lacking in Mims' writing. 1 (with controversy section) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forrest_Mims https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forrest_Mims 2 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Electronics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Electronics
- sas 8y ago
  As someone who has spent a lot of time both on learning electronics and understanding how to teach it, I would argue against this as bad advice. The Art of Electronics is like a recipe book — it's a (whimsical, yes) set of reference designs to be referred to like templates for a design engineer. The Art of Electronics is not a well-suited recommendation for a beginner or novice. Furthermore: I have spoken to Forrest Mims (disclosure: the discussions I have had with him were in the process of creating circuitclassics.com. That said, I have not met him personally.) The conclusion I came to was that his personal beliefs do not affect and have no bearing on his technical work. (Broadly, I do not understand why this man is so hounded for his particular personal beliefs.) It is true that hundreds of thousands of engineers launched their careers after being exposed to his books, that they are quite good at this, still relevant — and probably the only book on electronics to sell over 1M genuine (and many more untrackably via unauthorized reproduction etc.) copies.
  - pstuart 8y ago
    I have fond memories of his book and his writings. I was rather stunned that somebody so intelligent would be so willingly not so in other areas. No interest attacking him for it, but just, "Wow. really?" We all have our quirks, don't we.
FlyMoreRockets 8y ago
Most, if not all of the Forrest Mims "Engineer's Mini Notebooks" are up on the Internet Archive. https://archive.org/search.php?query=Forrest%20Mims https://archive.org/search.php?query=Forrest%20Mims
trevyn 8y ago
Mims’ prose book Siliconnections is also a fantastic read; he talks about working in the electronics field around that time.
gumby 8y ago
I know "me too"s are kinda junk comments but Mims was so influential on me, and I know on so many of my friends, that I just had to post this "me too" comment.
ChuckMcM 8y ago
Forrest's notebooks were the inspiration for my robotics notebook. I have most of them (although I've scanned them because that paper was just not going to survive!) and when I learned about lab notebooks in college labs I started keeping a notebook of my experiments in building microprocessor systems. For hobby work, having a notebook was especially helpful because I could quickly resynchronize what I was working on just by reading my notes. I also drew schematics, and noted weird discoveries (like you can run TTL even when the ground line is actually 12V as long as the VCC line is 17V :-). The complete list is here: http://www.forrestmims.org/publications.html http://www.forrestmims.org/publications.html These days though you sometimes have to figure out what the industry part number is for the radio shack number.
zipoff 8y ago
Forrest Mims' mini-notebooks were horrible. They consisted of circuits cribbed from app notes -- but with the explanatory text removed. There's no way to understand how circuits work by reading the mini-notebooks. They were specifically designed to keep readers ignorant so they would have to buy more of the lousy books. I plodded through the 555 timer book when I was a kid and didn't learn a single thing. If only I had known about databooks at the time, I could have called Signetics and they would have sent me a free copy of a book with all the same circuits and detailed theory of operations. I might have become an electrical engineer instead of a programmer. I believe Mims was also the author of the awful manual for Rat Shack's 100-in-one kit, which told the lie that a bipolar junction transistor is two diodes back-to-back. This is only true in the literal sense that a transistor has two P-N junctions; it's like if you roll down your car window and ask a passer-by for directions, and he helpfully tells you that you're in your car. It omits the key feature of the transistor, namely transconductance. And after reading it, I couldn't understand transistors for decades. Eventually I got hold of a college-level textbook which explained that when the base-emitter junction is forward-biased, the collector-emitter path acts like a resistor. Simple and clear, unlike Mims' writing which is designed to obfuscate and confound.
- dzdt 8y ago
  Lol. I had that 100-in-one kit and remember the transistor non-explanation. I remember the kit being kinda fun but not nearly so much as programming. With the hardware kit it was almost impossible to make anything outside of the limited recipes provided; with software it was easy to have your own ideas and make something new.
  - lowercased 8y ago
    i had that 100-in-1 kit too, and yeah, it was pretty non-accessible for a kid. got a few of the things to "work", but not any real understanding of how to make changes to anything to try something different. always thought it was my own limited brain. then we got a sinclair zx81... and i never looked at hardware again.
- mr_overalls 8y ago
chaghalibaghali 8y ago
I've always been keen to understand more about electronics, but never know where to start - I flicked through a PDF of the Mims Notebook and it looks like a great reference, but without enough explanation for me. Does anyone have any recommendations for a more "from zero knowledge" place to start learning?
- CamperBob2 8y ago
  A good next step up from Mims would probably be the ARRL Handbook. After that, or possibly concurrently with it, Horowitz and Hill's Art of Electronics 3rd ed. would be worth looking into. I've heard good things about Practical Electronics for Inventors as well but haven't actually seen a copy.
- starbeast 8y ago
  'Getting Started in Electronics" is the Mims book for people who are learning from scratch. His notebooks are meant more as reminders for stuff you already know.
- HeyLaughingBoy 8y ago
  Visit adafruit site. They are very high quality and oriented towards teaching people electronics and basic microcontrollers. A bit pricy, but I find their boards, documentation, etc., to be consistently high quality.
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
"There was a time when Radio Shack offered an incredible variety of supplies for the electronics hobbyist" Bit of a distraction perhaps. Yep, incredible variety. All at the worst value for money known to mankind (at least in the UK). Pack of three resistors. £1.95. Or was that £5.95? In 1970s or 1980. Enough bits for a simple op amp demo project £80, arm and leg. If memory serves, they were an early adopter of custom currency. Instead of pricing the items on shelves they colour coded the cheap (lol) stuff. Red dot meant 1.95, blue 5.95 etc. There were only 5 or 7 price bands. I hated the place. Thankfully in the back of an electronics mag were ads for a mysterious company "Maplin" that had a mail order catalogue. Everything was 10% or less of Tandy prices. Surprisingly Maplin was the one that lasted longest, though it was many years before they had a store nearby. On to books. The Radio Shack quick reference posters, cards, etc were brilliant. So I grabbed a a few indecipherable Radio Shack introductory books explaining various topics. They rarely seemed to explain anything. They were all shrink wrapped so you couldn't skim in store. I forget the authors though. I just remember quickly learning their own titles were something to avoid. I may have missed a dozen great authors thanks to that lesson. :) The ones to get were the Babani books as they were 95p each for a 100 page paperback. Not shrink wrapped either! Thankfully long before the end of the Net Book Agreement (Price printed on cover by publisher) or Radio shack would have sold them for a tenner. Most of which seemed to be by a guy called R A Penfold. Don't ever remember reading an "about the author". Never did work out if he was a real author or a house pen name as he was impossibly prolific. Turns out yes, indeed, he was one guy. Who must have written hundreds of electronics, radio, and other hobbyist books.
- stevekemp 8y ago
  As soon as you mentioned books I had a flashback to R. A. Penfold - and I was pleased you mentioned him. It didn't occur to me, at the time, it might have been a pen-name. As you say the author was very prolific. I still have a couple of those books, though I moved away from hardware without delving too deeply. It's only recently I've started tackling hardware again, but these days I think of microcontrollers and microprocessors which can be programmed, rather than discrete components. At the time the most I'd have touched would have been the odd op-amp, and the 555.
clueless123 8y ago
Loved this books and allowed me to build several of the projects.. (Including the very crappy LED oscilloscope). They where very non threatening to a 14 year old kid with a reduced command of the English language.
sizzzzlerz 8y ago
My interest in electronics started when I was 11 or 12 and has led me to a 40+ year career in electrical engineering and programming. Thinking back, I attribute that, in somewhat equal parts, to Popular Electronics, the ARRL Ham Radio Handbooks, and Forrest Mims. I only built a few smallish projects (mostly dealing with blinking LEDs) but they were enough to keep my interest. Funny thing is that, after I graduated with my EE degree and got my first job, I haven't touched a soldering iron or designed a circuit since.
squozzer 8y ago
For better or worse, the mini-notebook is where I learned about using a ballast resistor for LEDs.

139 points by blueatlas 8y ago

I loved these books as a kid. My grandpa got them for me, and a bread board, one birthday. He helped me build a power supply to use with the breadboard.

gavinpc 8y ago
Same (from my uncle, who then worked at Martin Marietta on the shuttle tankers). While I enjoyed reading through them and learned a number of concepts, his books helped demonstrate that I was not going to become an electrical engineer. I just didn't know what to do with it. Whereas, I was exposed to programming books at the same time (starting with David A. Lien) and was like a fish in water. Also, RIP Radio Shack, though it was really a slow death by degrees.
- setquk 8y ago
  Odd path here. I did EE and ended up writing software. All my peers who did mechanical engineering, control systems and law actually ended up writing software as well. All roads lead to software in 2018!

dreamcompiler 8y ago

I still have my Mims books and still occasionally refer to them. They're awesome.

le-mark 8y ago

Wow I really miss Radioshack. I needed a resistor to hack my my cars evaporation sensor. A $1000 job to replace the sensor (remove dashboard) or a $.20 resistor. Luckily found a shop not to far away.

arbuge 8y ago
Just curious, do you have a ~2007 Ford Fusion? Those cars are notorious for this particular issue. I tried hacking my evap sensor with a resistor as you described, but for some reason I couldn't get it to work. Ended up spending $700 to fix it...
- le-mark 8y ago
  It's a 2010 actually, I did get it to work. Seems like i had to disconnect the battery.
setquk 8y ago
I don’t miss these shops in the UK. They were very expensive and literally had nothing in stock here. You’d regularly phone up, confirm stock, get there after a 20 mile drive and then they couldn’t find the stock or had filed the wrong resistors. Now we have RS etc. Free next day delivery on everything. I regularly buy £0.20 of resistors at 7pm and they’re here by 10am next day.
- acct1771 8y ago
  Are you old enough to remember original Radio Shack? Or just lived near an unfortunately awful store?
  - setquk 8y ago
    Yes. We had Tandy here which was the UK version of Radio Shack and was a pretty 1:1 match to the US Radio Shack stores. I'm old enough to have been a member of the Tandy battery club. Perhaps unfortunately. The Tandy stores were pretty rubbish and overpriced. I've heard exactly the same complaints from people in the US at the time as well.
    - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
      Tandy utterly failed to understand the UK's hobbyist culture. Maplin and the smaller mail order shops all advertised in the electronics monthlies and absolutely owned the market, because they gave the impression of being by-hobbyists-for-hobbyists and had huge customer loyalty. Tandy turned up with their price gouging, and were literally laughed at. They managed to sell some TRS-80s - not a bad little computer - but aside from that most hobbyists were either indifferent or aggressively contemptuous because of their insanely greedy pricing. Where Maplin understood how to build a loyal customer base by giving away free information in a massive catalogue, and creating projects that were challenging and fun, Tandy only ever seemed to see their customers as prey they could exploit. It wasn't a good look then, and it's not a good look now.

femto 8y ago

Also his book "Understanding Digital Computers" (1978). The details (magnetic core and bubble memory) are dated, but the fundamentals (logic, gates, ALU, ...) are still relevant and clearly explained at a level that a school child should be able to understand.

mkstowegnv 8y ago

Stories about Mims always attract comments that make it clear that his writing inspired many to learn electronics. But to give some balance to the starry eyed impression left by the article and many such comments I suggest looking into his Wikipedia page [1] or any other source that talks about his creationist and climate change denialist views and how they have lead to controversy in his life. I would also strongly recommend against his books for beginners now because even simple projects should at least consider alternatives based on microcontrollers and there are now much better and more comprehensive books that cover the basics that Mims covered and more modern alternatives. I would recommend The Art of Electronics [2] (older editions can be bought affordably) which incorporates learn- from- real- world- bad- design wisdom, and which has a sense of humor utterly lacking in Mims' writing. 1 (with controversy section) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forrest_Mims https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forrest_Mims 2 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Electronics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Electronics

sas 8y ago
As someone who has spent a lot of time both on learning electronics and understanding how to teach it, I would argue against this as bad advice. The Art of Electronics is like a recipe book — it's a (whimsical, yes) set of reference designs to be referred to like templates for a design engineer. The Art of Electronics is not a well-suited recommendation for a beginner or novice. Furthermore: I have spoken to Forrest Mims (disclosure: the discussions I have had with him were in the process of creating circuitclassics.com. That said, I have not met him personally.) The conclusion I came to was that his personal beliefs do not affect and have no bearing on his technical work. (Broadly, I do not understand why this man is so hounded for his particular personal beliefs.) It is true that hundreds of thousands of engineers launched their careers after being exposed to his books, that they are quite good at this, still relevant — and probably the only book on electronics to sell over 1M genuine (and many more untrackably via unauthorized reproduction etc.) copies.
- pstuart 8y ago
  I have fond memories of his book and his writings. I was rather stunned that somebody so intelligent would be so willingly not so in other areas. No interest attacking him for it, but just, "Wow. really?" We all have our quirks, don't we.

FlyMoreRockets 8y ago

Most, if not all of the Forrest Mims "Engineer's Mini Notebooks" are up on the Internet Archive. https://archive.org/search.php?query=Forrest%20Mims https://archive.org/search.php?query=Forrest%20Mims

trevyn 8y ago

Mims’ prose book Siliconnections is also a fantastic read; he talks about working in the electronics field around that time.

gumby 8y ago

I know "me too"s are kinda junk comments but Mims was so influential on me, and I know on so many of my friends, that I just had to post this "me too" comment.

ChuckMcM 8y ago

Forrest's notebooks were the inspiration for my robotics notebook. I have most of them (although I've scanned them because that paper was just not going to survive!) and when I learned about lab notebooks in college labs I started keeping a notebook of my experiments in building microprocessor systems. For hobby work, having a notebook was especially helpful because I could quickly resynchronize what I was working on just by reading my notes. I also drew schematics, and noted weird discoveries (like you can run TTL even when the ground line is actually 12V as long as the VCC line is 17V :-). The complete list is here: http://www.forrestmims.org/publications.html http://www.forrestmims.org/publications.html These days though you sometimes have to figure out what the industry part number is for the radio shack number.

zipoff 8y ago

Forrest Mims' mini-notebooks were horrible. They consisted of circuits cribbed from app notes -- but with the explanatory text removed. There's no way to understand how circuits work by reading the mini-notebooks. They were specifically designed to keep readers ignorant so they would have to buy more of the lousy books. I plodded through the 555 timer book when I was a kid and didn't learn a single thing. If only I had known about databooks at the time, I could have called Signetics and they would have sent me a free copy of a book with all the same circuits and detailed theory of operations. I might have become an electrical engineer instead of a programmer. I believe Mims was also the author of the awful manual for Rat Shack's 100-in-one kit, which told the lie that a bipolar junction transistor is two diodes back-to-back. This is only true in the literal sense that a transistor has two P-N junctions; it's like if you roll down your car window and ask a passer-by for directions, and he helpfully tells you that you're in your car. It omits the key feature of the transistor, namely transconductance. And after reading it, I couldn't understand transistors for decades. Eventually I got hold of a college-level textbook which explained that when the base-emitter junction is forward-biased, the collector-emitter path acts like a resistor. Simple and clear, unlike Mims' writing which is designed to obfuscate and confound.

dzdt 8y ago
Lol. I had that 100-in-one kit and remember the transistor non-explanation. I remember the kit being kinda fun but not nearly so much as programming. With the hardware kit it was almost impossible to make anything outside of the limited recipes provided; with software it was easy to have your own ideas and make something new.
- lowercased 8y ago
  i had that 100-in-1 kit too, and yeah, it was pretty non-accessible for a kid. got a few of the things to "work", but not any real understanding of how to make changes to anything to try something different. always thought it was my own limited brain. then we got a sinclair zx81... and i never looked at hardware again.
mr_overalls 8y ago

chaghalibaghali 8y ago

I've always been keen to understand more about electronics, but never know where to start - I flicked through a PDF of the Mims Notebook and it looks like a great reference, but without enough explanation for me. Does anyone have any recommendations for a more "from zero knowledge" place to start learning?

CamperBob2 8y ago
A good next step up from Mims would probably be the ARRL Handbook. After that, or possibly concurrently with it, Horowitz and Hill's Art of Electronics 3rd ed. would be worth looking into. I've heard good things about Practical Electronics for Inventors as well but haven't actually seen a copy.
starbeast 8y ago
'Getting Started in Electronics" is the Mims book for people who are learning from scratch. His notebooks are meant more as reminders for stuff you already know.
HeyLaughingBoy 8y ago
Visit adafruit site. They are very high quality and oriented towards teaching people electronics and basic microcontrollers. A bit pricy, but I find their boards, documentation, etc., to be consistently high quality.

NeedMoreTea 8y ago

"There was a time when Radio Shack offered an incredible variety of supplies for the electronics hobbyist" Bit of a distraction perhaps. Yep, incredible variety. All at the worst value for money known to mankind (at least in the UK). Pack of three resistors. £1.95. Or was that £5.95? In 1970s or 1980. Enough bits for a simple op amp demo project £80, arm and leg. If memory serves, they were an early adopter of custom currency. Instead of pricing the items on shelves they colour coded the cheap (lol) stuff. Red dot meant 1.95, blue 5.95 etc. There were only 5 or 7 price bands. I hated the place. Thankfully in the back of an electronics mag were ads for a mysterious company "Maplin" that had a mail order catalogue. Everything was 10% or less of Tandy prices. Surprisingly Maplin was the one that lasted longest, though it was many years before they had a store nearby. On to books. The Radio Shack quick reference posters, cards, etc were brilliant. So I grabbed a a few indecipherable Radio Shack introductory books explaining various topics. They rarely seemed to explain anything. They were all shrink wrapped so you couldn't skim in store. I forget the authors though. I just remember quickly learning their own titles were something to avoid. I may have missed a dozen great authors thanks to that lesson. :) The ones to get were the Babani books as they were 95p each for a 100 page paperback. Not shrink wrapped either! Thankfully long before the end of the Net Book Agreement (Price printed on cover by publisher) or Radio shack would have sold them for a tenner. Most of which seemed to be by a guy called R A Penfold. Don't ever remember reading an "about the author". Never did work out if he was a real author or a house pen name as he was impossibly prolific. Turns out yes, indeed, he was one guy. Who must have written hundreds of electronics, radio, and other hobbyist books.

stevekemp 8y ago
As soon as you mentioned books I had a flashback to R. A. Penfold - and I was pleased you mentioned him. It didn't occur to me, at the time, it might have been a pen-name. As you say the author was very prolific. I still have a couple of those books, though I moved away from hardware without delving too deeply. It's only recently I've started tackling hardware again, but these days I think of microcontrollers and microprocessors which can be programmed, rather than discrete components. At the time the most I'd have touched would have been the odd op-amp, and the 555.

clueless123 8y ago

Loved this books and allowed me to build several of the projects.. (Including the very crappy LED oscilloscope). They where very non threatening to a 14 year old kid with a reduced command of the English language.

sizzzzlerz 8y ago

My interest in electronics started when I was 11 or 12 and has led me to a 40+ year career in electrical engineering and programming. Thinking back, I attribute that, in somewhat equal parts, to Popular Electronics, the ARRL Ham Radio Handbooks, and Forrest Mims. I only built a few smallish projects (mostly dealing with blinking LEDs) but they were enough to keep my interest. Funny thing is that, after I graduated with my EE degree and got my first job, I haven't touched a soldering iron or designed a circuit since.

squozzer 8y ago

For better or worse, the mini-notebook is where I learned about using a ballast resistor for LEDs.