#702

[@urlkrueger]

I didn't grow up in a "podunk" village but on a farm near one. Our school library consisted of Encyclopedia Britannica and Encyclopedia Americana. That was it, nothing more. Once a year in school we would be given a large list of paperback books we could buy for like $0.25 each and that is how I started a library. When I was 14 I found out from a fellow student that for $7 I could get a library card from the library in the big city. My parents thought that was OK but little did they know that for the next 2 years until I got a drivers license they would have to take me to town every two weeks to return books and pick out some more. Actually it worked out OK as they would drop me off and then go visit relatives while they were there. So I can't say it was any one book that changed my life but one little $7 library card sure did.

[@johnwest7993]

Grob's Basic Electronics and Horowitz and Hill's The Art of Electronics are the 2 books that changed my life. I had only a HS education, but I read both of those books and became an electronics tech.

[@alaricsnellpym]

My grandmother was a science teacher and my grandfather was an electrical engineer, before I was born. For whatever reason, as I was learning to read, their old textbooks were kicking around the house. I remember primary school teachers always being amazed when I'd already know everything they were about to try and teach me! I've always found old technical books much more readable and comprehensive than modern ones, and I collect them from second-hand book shops to this day. Sure, they lack coverage of modern semiconductors and microprocessors and the like, but for fundamental principles they're unbeatable!

[@user-hh4ly2xy6s]

Great video and story. Thanks for sharing! I love learning from books.

[@PowderMill]

Great story.
It saddens me to have to “dispose “ of the books in my collection, but with the advent of e-books and PDFs,
my wife constantly presses me to thin out the collection.
For some reason, the local public library did not want to accept our generous offer
of Novell Netware 2.x manuals with my reams of handwritten notebooks.🙄😆
They were honest with us and told us they have no physical space remaining for such donations.
The world is changing rapidly... so definitely save your older encyclopedias, dictionaries and textbooks .
The “woke” educators are eradicating much of written history.
Save and preserve history for our children and grandkids.
Thank you yet again IMSAI Guy. 😀

[@peterrhodes5663]

It's all very convenient relying on the internet to provide the information that is contained in those books, until there is no internet. Too many people rely on GPS to go anywhere. Can you imagine the chaos if it was switched off? Depending on something that is out of your control is potentially very dangerous.

[@levent8208]

@@peterrhodes5663 Our dependence on the technology is not a good thing. I am a software engineer and I love books

[@computeraidedworld1148]

I'm still in high school, I just picked up the book Art of Electronics 2nd Edition you had shown on your channel, and plan on learning from it. Hopefully someday I'll design my own computer from scratch, it's all so fascinating.

[@IMSAIGuy]

Never stop learning. I still learn something every day

[@VV0RK]

I really enjoyed this video, thank you for sharing.

[@reidgraham3305]

My book was by Alfred Morgan, The Boy's First Book of Radio and Electronics. After finding it in the local library I was hooked at a very early age and my career path determined.

[@embrykendrick4517]

Thanks, great stories. Two books for me. 1957 Radio Amateurs Handbook enabled me to work with electronics until the second book, a magazine. In the 1970s I worked for two companies, one in Palo Alto, other in Van Nuys and commuted from Georgia. I really wanted to study medicine, but didn't think I could do math. I took an intelligence test in a flight magazine on my California commute and realized I could. In retrospect. I had been solving all sorts of problems all along. So at age 40 I went back to school for 10 years and have been in health care since 1990.

[@curtkeisler7623]

Thank you for sharing the stories

[@101blog]

Excellent story . I'm sure many have these pivital moments and never even realise them loving the Videos ..thanks

[@joaopaulocoelho5401]

Happy birthday for your 65 years. I hope that all your dreams come true. My academic path was utterly changed, not by a book, but by a differential equation :D

[@bendunselman]

Being a physicist by education myself I really liked your story about the tensor calculus book. And my life changing book at age 8 was titled 'Chemistry at home'. Ham radio and electronics followed naturally. Still have the latter chemistry book as well as many pro physics, electronics and some ham radio books.

[@IMSAIGuy]

I had 'chemistry at home' also and must have done every experiment and built the equipment

[@phenej]

Book that changed my life: a children's book called Mary Anning's Treasures by Helen Bush. A story about a real person, a poor girl in Lyme Regis England mid 1800s who found the first dinosaur fossils. Mother of modern geology? Supported her widowed mother selling pretty fossils to summer tourists...

[@alexandermoody1946]

Thank you for your introduction to this book.

[@electronicengineer]

Happy belated Birthday from an avid subscriber! Thank you for sharing your personal stories today. I found both of the stories you told us very interesting and I was even able to relate on becoming a "teacher's aid", in Electronics I & II classes during my tenure at my junior high school. Fred

[@IMSAIGuy]

Thank you. My dads name was Fred

[@ke9tv]

Another retired enginerd here, a couple of years older than you. Cool stories! I can't really think of "book that changed my life', but I can name spme life-changing teachers. Maybe someday I'll do a video about them.
I'm pretty sure that my mechanical drawing teacher in high school got some of the assignments for plates out of those little books! (But he was NOT "teacher who changed my life" - we didn't get along well at all.)
+1 on tensor calculus! I never thought I'd use it, until later on I got into spaceborne radar for a bit, and it's amazing how much easier orbital mechanics gets when you put it in Hamiltonian form! (Yes, a _classical_ Hamiltonian - this stuff was pre-GPS so nobody bit the physicists cared about the GR stuff.)

[@sm7udb]

Lovely story. Thank you. I bought a chemistry book which I found at a used book store. Glanced in it but really got it.

[@herbertsusmann986]

One nice thing about math is it doesn't change much decade to decade. That 1953 Tensor book is probably just as good to learn from as any modern book, maybe better?? I did Special Relativity in Physics but never got to Tensors and General Relativity. I had switched to EE by then and realized that a lot of that super theoretical stuff is nice but you will never use it in any real job (unless you teach it).

[@HarnessedGnat]

I have an eerily similar story... our school had a PDP8, a teletype, and an IMSAI 8080, before the first Apple II appeared. My teacher-mentor was a physics teacher, he seemed young enough to be in the early years of his career, and he provided the space and time for me to plunk away in CPM and Basic(?) to write a little Mastermind playing program. It wasn't smart enough to play but it could tell you how close your guesses were. The following year they had an introductory computing class, and I'd be the one person doing the assignments ten minutes before class. But I did have to sit through the lessons. Those were some of the best memories from my youth. We've been out of contact since school.

[@chrisgroenewegen3756]

Many affected my live and have fond memories but not live changing I would say. One of them was Z80 programming by Rodnay Zaks

[@srabansinha3430]

Stay Safe and In good Health!! :)

[@levent8208]

Nice story !

[@wallacesteinbrecher4307]

"Radiotron Designer's Handbook"

[@IMSAIGuy]

vacuum tubes!

[@giubin]

who changed my life is not a book (i've some great books in my heart) but my great cousin, an electronic engineer, but unfortunatelly he died prematurely in 2018 - at age 49. I feel alone now. The evenings spent talking and studying, making something with electronic... he was a "genius" (studing a looot, he was 11 years older than me) you know! I learn all from him (not so much english i think). When i was a kid, I learn to making pcb: to have a glass surface, we took down the window from his mom house, and go with photoengraving... even in WINTER!!! Good times gone.

[@giubin]

p.s.: do you remember that we already talk about war games? I saw that movie thanks to him, like all other great movies.

[@PapasDino]

I can hardly remember my number now but I'll never forget Klondike (KL) 23914 as my mom made me memorize it when we lived San Francisco in the late 50's/early 60's.

[@mehmetaliozdemir_]

good story.

[@ydonl]

Pretty terrific.

[@bobkozlarekwa2sqq59]

In a few strange ways, there was one book that influenced my life, Abby Hoffman's "Steal This Book". No, not in any life of crime, but there were several examples of if you waited long enough you could probably get anything you wanted for free, or at a very reduced cost. Wish I had that book ... loaned it to a friend and never got it back!

[@joeteejoetee]

"...Nobody Ink's anymore.": Says the genius with using a Rapidograph daily... :*D

[@cwebs1000]

In days of old, 1950's my phone number was also HI, for Hill top.

[@q12x]

very nice !

[@gretalaube91]

Did he let you punch your own cards? I miss the "tactile feedback." My technical life book was an ARRL handbook that a janitor had put in the library. 73 de W3IHM

[@IMSAIGuy]

the high school had a card punch machine that I used

[@k5rmj]

That book is over 700 on Amazon

[@jdmccorful]

HU5-0929, " Principles of Refrigeration", Calculus, all Greek to me.

[@chrisscott1547]

I have a great title for your next video! "Maxwell's Equations for Dummies."

[@IMSAIGuy]

Ooof! that would be interesting

[@bobkozlarekwa2sqq59]

I still have my HS drafting tools ....

[@osmanfb1]

were you studying electrical/electronics engineering? what is GR doing in electrical engr curriculum? By the way, I found that book at my school's library (~1971)and years later Dover re-published it in print and I bought it. I always though it was a readable succinct book on the subject.

[@IMSAIGuy]

I did not study EE. I have degrees in Physics and Mathematics

[@engineereuler1762]

Thank you boss. I am an EE and was enjoying your electronics wisdom for a long time whenever I had time and ran across this video. I have a thicker Tensor Analysis book than yours but the story behind mine is so insanely weird that I will probably write a book about it and I am so eager to share it with you, I just can't put it here in public for personal reasons. I hope that I can call/skype or at least email you that if possible.

[@clifforddicarlo9178]

What was the copyright date of Mechanical Drawing?

[@IMSAIGuy]

1913, 1924

[@rolandprocell]

Delicious!

[@muzdokgober9371]

I'm your fans from Indonesia 🇮🇩🇮🇩🇮🇩 😊

[@IMSAIGuy]

welcome, I spent a lot of time working in Penang but never made it over to your country

[@TheElectronicDilettante]

You are an excellent storyteller. Your current videos have great content but starting to lose that hook that is your storytelling.

[@ronaldjorgensen6839]

br-549