“Solder Smoke” is the story of a secret, after-hours life in electronics. Bill Meara started out as a normal kid, from a normal American town. But around the age of 12 he got interested in electronics, and he has never been the same. To make matters worse, when he got older he became a diplomat. His work has taken him to Panama, Honduras, El Salvador, the Spanish Basque Country, the Dominican Republic, the Azores islands of Portugal, London, and, most recently, Rome. In almost all of these places his addiction to electronics caused him to seek out like-minded radio fiends, to stay up late into the night working on strange projects, and to build embarrassingly large antennas above innocent foreign neighborhoods.

Check it out on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/SolderSmoke-Global-Adventures-Wireless-Electronics/dp/0578053128

From the article: Xerox Parc’s Engineers on How They Invented the Future
Read the full article here: https://spectrum.ieee.org/xerox-parc

“I’ve always thought the fact that [David] Boggs was a ham radio operator was important…. [He] knew that you could communicate reliably through an unreliable medium. I’ve often wondered what would have happened if he hadn’t had that background.”
—Bert Sutherland

“I’ve always thought the fact that Boggs was a ham radio operator was important,” Sutherland said. “It had a great impact on the way the Ethernet was designed, because the Ethernet fundamentally doesn’t work reliably. It’s like citizens’ band radio, or any of the other kinds of radio communication, which are fundamentally not reliable in the way that we think of the telephone. Because you know it basically doesn’t work, you do all the defensive programming—the ‘say again, you were garbled’ protocols that were worked out for radio communication. And that makes the resulting network function extremely reliably.”

“Boggs was a ham and knew that you could communicate reliably through an unreliable medium. I’ve often wondered what would have happened if he hadn’t had that background,” Sutherland added.

Once the Ethernet was built, using it was fairly simple: a computer that wanted to send a message would wait and see whether the cable was clear. If it was, the machine would send the information in a packet prefaced with the address of its recipient. If two messages collided, the machines that sent them would each wait for a random interval before trying again.

One innovative use for the network had nothing to do with people sending messages to one another; it involved communication solely between machines. Because the dynamic memory chips were so unreliable in those days, the Alto also ran a memory check when it wasn’t doing anything else. Its response to finding a bad chip was remarkable: “It would send a message telling which Alto was bad, which slot had the bad board, and which row and column had the bad chips,” Thornburg said. “The reason I found out about this was that one day the repairman showed up and said, ‘Any time you’re ready to power down, I need to fix your Alto,’ and I didn’t even know anything was wrong.”

Sean, KC3SZH brought this to my attention this morning and I have to agree this would make a good club kit project.  The cost of the antenna is $69.95 I think the club could cover the shipping for a group buy.  This is an End Feed 10,15,20,40 meter band antenna good for POTA and SOTA work.  It can handle up to 250 watts so full size rigs are usable with this antenna. We would order the kit and then assemble them up at the club.  Drill out the holes, wining the coil, and a little bit of soldering.  So if this would be your first kit time kit you would have the support and supervision of some of the club mentors.

If you interested please email me at n3lrg{at}w3kwh{dit}com the kit will cost you $69.95

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Arrl Shops: http://www.arrl.org/shop/End-Fed-Half-Wave-Antenna

Manufacture:  https://www.hfkits.com

Assembly: http://www.arrl.org/end-fed-half-wave-antenna-kit