A wonderful web site full of wonderful old books and magazines

[top204]

This site has captivated me since I found it a few years ago. It is full of some of the magazines me and dad used to buy every month and read after each other, and the books I used to read in the book shops because I couldn't afford them when I was a boy. It also has wonderful old books and magazines that still bring a smile to my face, because electronics then, was "real" electronics. :-)

https://worldradiohistory.com/index.htm

Enjoy!

[Bob (G8GFA)]

OMG, what a find! Just wasted the morning going back to the days of my youth. I even built some of the stuff in these magazines. Ah, happy memories.

[top204]

I built my very first oscilloscope from the Babani book when I was about 14 years old with dad's old 3BP1 CRT, and I started collecting the old Bernards and Babani books quite a few years ago because they were the main books I used to read and read and read again in the town's bookshop to see which one was the best and the one I could afford with saving my pocket money. :-)

Dad, bless him, would sometimes come in from work with a Babani or Bernards book for us both to read, when he could afford one. I still remember my first Babani book. It was "Two Transistor Circuits" when I was about 12 years old, and I built every project in it, including the 2 transistor superhet radio.  I had to save up for weeks to get some of the components in it, but electronics was, and still is, my passion. :-)

Happy memories of happy days.

[toymaker]

When I was young an 0C71 transistor was 15 shillings and my weekly pocket money was two and six so projects then took a long time to build!

I then learned that if you scraped the paint off the 0C71 it became a photo transistor (0CP71)!

I still have some Babani books, they were great epically ones by Robert Penfold.

Happy memories indeed, it was so exciting then and my first LED blew me away!

[pjdenyer]

I am so glad that I have found the new home of the proton forum.

I have been a registered user of Proton since 2007 and the forum site has provided me with wonderful resources for my projects.

I have been a BASIC/ASM programmer since 1978, I grew up with ZX81/Spectrum/CPM/PC, many people I have worked with have berated me for continuing with BASIC/ASM - as they were 'C' programmers, but I was able to show them that my programs were just as fast, flexible and functional as theirs.

Les's Proton compiler was just what I was looking for when I joined my latest company and the want me to develop new projects to solve their problems.

Long Live Proton PDS

 

[Yves]

Yes the nostalgy feel. At 10 I build my first galena radio reciver. Solid atate diodes didnt exist then but galena which a lead sulphide had some semi conductive properties. A huge antena wire a coil and a galena cristal plus a huge variable tuning capacitor was giving enough signal to hear close buy radio station through a piezo hear phone. It was magic then (still is).

Yves

[John Drew]

There was a silver/lead mine only 3km from my home near the Adelaide Hills. As youngsters in the 40s and early 50s my mate and I would go into the old mines with our torches and chip galena from the walls of the mine. Some pieces were better than others as detectors. We made catswhiskers from springy wire and we'd listen to our local stations and especially the relayed cricket games in England coming in on short wave to Australia. We never told our mums we went into the mines. Much later the mines were blocked, a pity as it stopped adventurous lads. We just had to keep away from shafts. Nowadays everything has to be safe and we are bringing up a generation of over protected kids.
John

[top204]

My lovely dad once showed me how to make a crystal radio with one of his old razor blades as the crystal.

I know the principle of it now, but as a boy I thought it was magic. :-)

He also showed me how to make the coil from a toilet roll insert painted with Shellac and put in the oven to dry out, and an old tuning capacitor from the, many, old radios that were dumped on the fields and back yards back in the 1970s, so we never had to pay for radio parts, which was just as well because we couldn't afford them. But that was the joy of electronics... Making something that didn't work or was classed as rubbish, into something new, or repairing it, and understanding how to do it from books and experimentation! When a TV goes bang!!! because of something you did wrong, you don't make that mistake again. LOL

That's why I became a TV repair engineer, because of my dad.

[See_Mos]

Same here, my old man gave me these in the early 60's when I was about 13.  They date back to 1950.

I spent many hours recovering bits from scrap radios and TV's because we couldn't afford to buy them.

[RayEllam]

I spent a lot of my youth in the early 70's hunting down rubbish skips containing old valve radios and TV's.

My pocket money and paper round couldn't finance an RS account at the time. I was a hit making guitar amplifiers out of old valve radios for my buddies who wanted to be rock stars on a slim budget 😎

Those were the days.......wonderful times 🤔

[See_Mos]

My first crystal set is here on page 781  Couldn't afford the transistor though.

https://worldradiohistory.com/UK/Practical/Wireless/60s/PW-1960-01.pdf

it is interesting looking through the old advertisements, many did not change for years on end.

I have an almost complete collection of Practical wireless from when it started being issued monthly and an almost complete set of Radio Constructor, just a few of the very early copies missing.