The numbers are a testament to not only the content and the style of the books, but to the way in which Mims presented the subject matter – simple building blocks, easily understood as units, and moreover, easily built on a breadboard. Mims’ first Engineer’s Notebook would eventually sell 650,000 copies, with the updated Engineer’s Notebook II and the Mini-notebook series would only add to that total. Each volume took about three weeks to produce, including designing each circuit and building it four times to make sure it worked. The later Mini-notebook series were produced using similar techniques, although this time mercifully with a mechanical pencil. Illustrations and schematics were likewise hand drawn, and all by Mims himself. He recounts that “a single error required redoing an entire page,” and that the effort “drew blood from the middle finger of my right hand.” The first pages of the book were “typeset” with a Selectric typewriter to ease the reader into the hand-drawn pages to come. Mims rose to the challenge, hand-inking each page painstakingly on Mylar sheets. He knew of Mims’ notebook style and asked if it would be possible to develop a book using the same layouts. With a monthly column in Popular Electronics magazine by 1975 and a couple of volumes of hobbyist books written for Howard Sams and Company, Radio Shack’s technical editor Dave Gunzel approached Mims about working for them. Source: Īfter co-founding MITS, the company that would later go on to produce the Altair 8800, Mims was gaining quite a reputation in hobby electronics and as a writer. A graduate of Texas A&M with a degree in government, Mims was largely self-educated in electronics. After a stint with Air Force intelligence in Vietnam and an engineering assignment to the Air Force Weapons Lab that required special dispensation because he lacked an engineering degree, Mims continued to teach himself electronics in the early 1970s in exactly the way his Engineer’s Notebook would later document - one small project at a time. ![]() Like many of us, Mims had no formal education in the fields that were to become his stock in trade. The full AMA is worth a read, but here’s the short story of those classics of pulp non-fiction. It was a pretty astute marketing decision by Radio Shack to publish them and feature them so prominently near the parts - sort of makes the string of poor business decisions that led to the greatly diminished “RadioShack” stores of today all the more puzzling. Luckily, Forrest Mims recently did an AMA on reddit, and he answered a lot of questions regarding how these books came about. I always wondered about those books and how they came about. Each page was a work of technical beauty that served as an inspiration as I filled my own graph-paper notebooks with page after page of circuits I would find neither the time nor money to build. Printed on subdued graph paper with simple line drawings and schematics, the accompanying text did not appear to be typeset, but rather hand lettered. Those of you that have seen the book and any of its sequels, like the Mini-notebook Series, will no doubt remember the style of the book. I learned so much from that book, and as I used it to plan my Next Big Project I’d often wonder how the book came about. Many years rolled by, and my trusty and shop-worn first edition of Mims’ book, with my marginal notes and more than one soldering iron burn scarring its pulp pages, has long since gone missing. Wish I could find my original copy from 1979. And like many of that vintage, one of the first books I picked up was the Engineer’s Notebook by Forrest M. 12-year old me only had Christmas and birthday money to spend, and what I could beg from my parents, so I tended to buy books - I figured I needed to learn before I started blowing money on parts. ![]() It was a treasure trove to a budding hardware hobbyist.īut over on the side, invariably near the parts, was a rack of books for sale, mostly under the Archer brand. Perfboard panels on hinges held pegs with cards of resistors for 49 cents, blister packs of 2N2222 transistors and electrolytic capacitors, and everything else you needed to get your project going. In the back of each store, past the displays of Realistic 8-track players, Minimus-7 speakers, Patrolman scanners, and just beyond the battery bin where you could cash in your “Battery of the Month Club” card for a fresh, free 9-volt battery, lay the holy of holies - the parts. ![]() There was a time when Radio Shack offered an incredible variety of supplies for the electronics hobbyist.
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