Re: Radio as a gateway drug
"I think there's a huge difference between making something out of a tiny number of active components (in the limit, one diode)"
I seem to remember that if you had a crystal earphone that would serve as the diode. But memory hazy. I once had a 1920s or so book where the instructions for making a crystal set started "Go to the chemist's to buy .... bishmuth ..., melt together, break up, select a likely looking fragment for use as the detector crystal." (Stupidly threw that book out a decade or two ago when moving house :( ).
Agree that a crystal radio set was a perfect introduction to electronics. And a PDP8 with punch tape was the perfect introducion to IT (had to manually load (using 12 front panel switches) a short piece of software first so that it could recognise the tape reader). Guess that makes me an official old f.....rt!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
