>If anyone knows of any good books (or other references) along these lines,
>I would very much appreciate pointers to them.

Electronics is fun. If IBM have used the Intersil 7170 clock chip instead
of the el cheapo 4 bit chip, they wouldn't be thinking about the year 2K
crud right now. Course the 7170 cost 4 bucks more. Then again, maybe its a
good thing they didn't know about it...;-)

Melting a few parts, reading a lot of Elector (if its still printed), ETI,
Pop Electronics, Radio Electronics, buying breadboards (non loaf type),
getting a digital designer (Douglas Electronics) (I use Circuit Maker) goes
a long way to learning. Books are fine to a point, but unless you get hands
on, you're just paper smart.

Soldering is also a fine art to learn and not as easy as some would like to
think.

I don't know if Jameco (California) is still in business, but they used to
have a neat catalog that electronics buffs could drool over. Plus they used
to sell a lot of little modules you could sort of "interface" together to
make do things. I bought a whole bunch of Mr. Coffee innards from them one
time to make some timers for a sprinkler system. It was cheaper than
building them from scratch.

"Interfacing a Mac Serial Port to RS-232 Lab Equipment on his web site at

 http://www.mindspring.com/~jc1/serial/main.html

If you have some ideas and want to disuss them in more detail, email me direct.

Mel Patrick                               /'\   /'\
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