Heathkit cult

[Jack Crenshaw]

BMW wrote:

> When I'm not trying to get DZKit off the ground, I work at Agilent, which
> you may know is a big electronics company that used to be called
> Hewlett-Packard. We have had a real hard time finding engineers who know
> anything about soldering or who have done anything on their own. The lack of
> kit products in the 90's has really put a damper on the ability of the
> industry to find engineers who know electronics innately by virtue of loving
> electronics, building kits, making stuff from the Handbook and so on. I'm
> still not convinced that there aren't still people out there who want to
> learn by doing, whether it's audio, ham radio, computers, video or whatever.
> I do know it's hard to find kids who want to tear open a Gameboy to see how
> it works rather than sit there in front of a screen mesmerized by the
> graphics. But we have to try.

On that subject, y'all might appreciate a true tale from my old major
professor back at Auburn U. Dr. Carr was an old-school, tinkering
physicist from a time when the only way to get a piece of lab gear was
to build it.  He's the one who taught me electronics.

At Auburn, we were proud of the fact that we still had labs with our
physics courses, in a time when most big universities were dropping them
as too much bother.  Our labs, which went all the way through senior
year, were filled with hundreds of bits of Heathkit test scopes,
oscillators, and the like.  You guys would have loved our power
distribution system -- a custom crossbar system (designed by one of our
profs) that let us distribute kilowatts of power in all combinations of
DC, 60 Hz AC, and adjustable-frequency AC to several labs at once.

But I digress.  Some years later, Dr. Carr told me that he visited one
of the Ivy League schools, I believe it was Harvard, to see the Physics
Department.  After showing him the classrooms, etc., the dept. head took
him to a facility where they were working on some kind of government
grant to build an electronic gadget.  After showing him the various
assembly stages, he took him to the final test/calibration area.  There,
a bunch of young people in white lab coats were busily testing the
finished units. Part of the testing involved calibrating the systems by
driving them with signals, and adjusting several pots, etc., to get the
right values on a meter.

Dr. Carr commented, "Ah, I see you've got some of your undergraduates
gainfully employed here. That's great."  I mention in passing that he
used to do that himself.  Whenever someone came along, as they often do,
that wasn't very good scholastically, but had a knack for hardware, he'd
try to get them employed as a tech.  A few of them were the ones
building all those Heathkits.

The department head corrected him, "No, these aren't undergraduates,
they're graduates."

Dr. Carr, puzzled, "You mean these guys in lab coats already have their
bachelor's degrees?"

"No," said the dept. head.  "They have their Master's."

Incredulously, Dr. Carr asked, "You mean to tell me that you've got
people with Master's degrees in Physics from Harvard, reading meters and
adjusting pots?"

"Yes," said the department head.

"Um ... do they like that?" He asked.

"Not much," came the reply.

"Don't you have a problem with high turnover?", Dr. Carr asked again.

"Yes, as a matter of fact, we do. That's one of our management problems."

"With respect, may I ask," Dr. Carr continued, "why in the world would
you employ master's degree graduates to read meters and adjust pots?"

Came the answer, "The undergraduates don't know how to read a meter."

Jack

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