150-In-1 Project Kit

I’m a techno-geek by trade… it’s part of my job, obviously, but even as a kid I was fascinated by doodads, gizmos and gadgets. One of my favorite Christmas presents ever was a Radio Shack 150-In-1 Electronic Project Kit. This totally cool product was comprised of a big board loaded with electronic components already soldered into place and spring-loaded terminals for connection points. You got a bunch of wires of different lengths with the kit, along with batteries and a project book.

Basically you followed the instructions and by inserting various wires into the terminals and running them amongst the components, you could build stuff. A basic AM receiver, a short-range FM transmitter, a light detector, a simple lie detector… all sorts of neat things that did cool stuff. The book also showed the actual schematic diagrams for each project and a brief explanation of how and why each project worked.

Electronics fascinated me. As a skinny, gawky kid who was sick a lot, clumsy and cursed with buck teeth, I had few friends. I usually had to amuse myself and my room became the gateway to an exciting virtual world where it didn’t matter what I looked like.

My first shortwave radio

That Radio Shack project kit was the springboard to many other related interests, first among them shortwave radio and general radio communications. I earned money mowing grass and bought a used shortwave radio receiver. Night after night I would sit hunched over that thing with headphones on, listening to signals coming from hundreds or thousands of miles away. And not just commercial broadcast stations, either…. I loved tuning into elusive transmissions such as those coming from cruise ships and the military.

Every kid in the neighborhood had a toy walkie-talkie – those cheap two-way radios that might cover a few hundred feet if you were lucky. I tore mine apart, changed some components, plugged it into an external power supply, and ran a 50-foot wire antenna to it. I could be heard for half a mile.

The Radio Shack kit’s FM transmitter project? I managed to hook it to my record player’s tone arm so I could broadcast my own favorite songs to a nearby receiver. Illegal as hell according to the Federal Communications Commission but I didn’t know that at the time. It was neat to cut the grass while listening to my own tunes using a portable FM radio and an earphone.

Eventually I grew into a somewhat normal high school teenager, even though I was still viewed as “different” by some of my peers and thus still found it hard to make friends. The CB radio craze had hit. Everyone had a CB transceiver in their car or home, it seemed. Keep in mind this was long before cellphones and Facebook.

My first CB radio

My friends and I all bought CBs. But true to form, I wasn’t satisfied… I learned how to add extra (read: illegal) channels to my rig. My goal wasn’t to just chit-chat with local people, but to also see how far I could get my signal to reach. Before long I was running what was known as a linear amplifier (read: illegal as all hell) that boosted my signal to a huge 150 watts of broadcast power. I could talk to CB operators across the U.S. and even overseas.

After graduation I moved from North Carolina to Florida, landed a job at a furniture factory and got married (read: BIG mistake).  With the realities of life having set in, my interest in the world of electronic toys waned for a while as I concentrated on earning a living and paying the bills.

One day at the local Radio Shack I noticed they were selling a small computer for home use. Say what? I knew what computers were since the place I worked at used them, but who on Earth would need a computer at home? The salesman explained to me what the thing did and how “home computers” were going to eventually be a fixture in most households. Yeah, right, and so would satellite television, right Mister Salesman? (And yes, he wanted me to buy one of those systems, too. The dish measured 9 feet across and the system sold for several thousand bucks.)

My first computer

But he did pique my interest in the computer, so after handing him $450 I walked out of the store as the proud owner of a new Tandy Color Computer Model II. What I would do with the thing, I really had no idea.

However, once I got home and actually hooked it up to my television set, I was once again the inquisitive kid I used to be. Cool! After entering numerous lines of code manually in a programming language called BASIC, I got the machine to beep at me and print “Hello, Don” on the screen.

The only drawback with the Color Computer was that once you turned it off, all your programming efforts disappeared forever. This was years before hard drives became affordable for home computer geeks. The manual explained I had the option to connect a conventional cassette recorder to the computer with a special cable, and save my programs to tape. The special cable was my next purchase. I also used that as an opportunity to berate the salesman for not explaining to me that my little dancing man program which took me 9 hours to type in would vanish when I turned the computer off.

As they say, the rest is history. That Tandy Color Computer, pitifully primitive by today’s standards, reignited my interest in electronic doohickeys, and subsequently in computer bulletin board systems (BBSes), the precursors to today’s Internet, and in the Internet as we know it today. Now in my 50s, I am still acutely interested in all things to do with the the workings of television, radio, computers and other electronics.

We have so many of these types of toys at our disposal today that we take them for granted. If you had told me in 1972 that I would someday be able to access a global network of information from my home, or make a call using a phone that wasn’t wired into a wall jack and was actually owned by me and not Ma Bell, I would have laughed in your face.

I’m still a techno-geek. However, it’s not quite the same as it was 40 years ago. We’re inundated with electronic technology to the point where it’s a backdrop to our everyday lives. We post to Facebook while reading CNN.com and sending a text message to a friend, and think nothing about what makes it all work.

Sometimes I miss that lonely misfit of 1971, his face lit by the green glow emanating from the dials of his shortwave receiver in the wee hours. It was simply more fun back then.