Ciaran
Senior Moderator
友情は魔法だ
@LP2Lily
Greetings!
Greetings!
My background started working at the baby bell phone company on a university in the US. We went through all the dorm rooms and offices every year maintaining phones and other telecom equipment. You wouldn’t believe how often people hid their pot inside the cases of their phones - these were the old wired boxes that hung on the wall so there was lots of room inside.
Our security alarm system was all tube based. Not because it was cheeper, but because no one could hack it. We got so many reports from the campus cops and other officers who responded to alarms only to find the robbers staring at an opened alarm panel, literally gobsmacked by the glowing tubes and inexplicably retro wax-and-string wrapped wires. Invariably they’d have some hyper modern hacking gear, just hanging limply in their hands as they posed for selfies with the officers in front of the glowing boxes during their arrests.
So, I got to learn a little about tubes, and the local AxMan junk store kept us stocked with a random assortment of tubes intended for old TV sets for years.
Later I worked at some places that were involved in the first laserprinters, but at that point it went from pure electronics to pulling motherboards out of PCs, Macs, and Sun Microsystems and getting them to fit and work together inside of various photocopiers to make them “Cross Platform”.
That’s why so many of the early “Cross Platform” laserprinters started at US $ 18K. They literally had one of every kind of computer they worked with inside of them, because it was cheeper than paying the licensing for everyone’s proprietary networks topologies.
2LDR: Make the computer think the printer is a monitor, and it outputs the “thing to be printed” without any additional work needed.
Getting those monsters through the FCC licensing was always a freaking nightmare. The Faraday cages inside of those printers were some of the more expensive parts, and when you’d turn one of them on they would literally brown out the lights in the room.
Fun times.
I worked for awhile with Digi on the “Internet Of Things”, with stuff like light bulbs for street lights that were wifi repeaters to create free wireless for cars. But that plan went POOF because the barrier for implementation was 5 cents a module, and no one could ever get it cheeper than 12 or 15 cents. Also, public wifi is such a heavily regulated industry in the US. There’s literally laws preventing you from setting up public networks that compete with the established network providers for towns. Soooo … we did ISDN instead. Because Japan, which was still completely happy to pay whatever it cost to get the internet crammed into their already straining city infrastructures.
But, yeah. Electronics and electrical engineering is amazing stuff, and a ton of fun. I hope you have an amazing career :)
And, for tubes? Just keep it simple seems to be the way to survive. Or, like, work on some tube amps for guitars and stereos - lots of volts there, but also lots of fun and fairly simple circuits. Also those tubes are commonly available at most music stores that sell electric guitars.