"I have a book somewhere ..."

> I have a book somewhere (how many times will I end up saying that even just this week)

So I'm in this old dead-tree bookstore (remember them?) and find a Physics and Technology of Semiconductor Devices. 1967. Uh, I don't bother unless it is very old (1954) or into the 1970s when Silicon got very good. But WTF, check it out. Good chapters. Author is some guy at Fairchild, says on the dustjacket under a foto of a real 1963 geek, glasses like goggles.

Huh, but inside it says this guy A. S. Grove is at Intel.... the penny drops. "A.S." is ANDY Grove! And he became Intel's third employee between dust-jacket printing and page printing.

A. S. Grove (1967). Physics and Technology of Semiconductor Devices. Wiley. ISBN 0471329983

OK, much of the stuff I associate with the early 1970s is the stuff Andy was doing in the early 1960s. Basic useful theory of epitaxial growth and diffusion and how to make it do good things. Oxide as an engineering material. How everything varies with temperature and concentration. He helped move the racket from artful recipes to engineered predictability. He's to blame for the good parts I recall from 1971. Remarkable clarity.

So it is halfway through the book before we look at electrical properties of a silicon P-N junction. How it conducts, and not conduct. Why it breaks down, and why breakdown starts in diffusion corners. BJT is another chapter, FET, and some about the insulated-Gate FET, which he boldly predicts may become important.

NOT a fix-your-amp book. None of this stuff really helps you understand transistor circuits. But if you wonder why Silicon parts do what they do, and some of how they are made, may be worth a look.

I paid $35 and don't regret it. ABE.com lists copies from $20 to $200.


Oh, I ordered a Professor Game but isn't here yet. (There is a GAME of that name too.)

Yeah, I never read it methodically but Grove (yes, in storage) did look good, and it's fun to have a big name author. And I prize my pristine copy of Shockley and my autographed copy of Bode. Odd that the guy who sold me the latter didn't think the inscription was all that remarkable. Another online seller didn't even notice that the "Fred" on the FFEP of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior was that of Skinner himself (attested to by Juile Skinner Vargas, one of the man's daughters). I noticed it years after purchase, and before I found out that those in the know knew he signed that way most of the time.

I hope someday before I pass I'll have the books up again, all of them. One friend has a library with lots of room in Puerto Vallarta and has offered to put me and the books up. He has also described the efficacy of the frogs in keeping the scorpion population down, and the bats doing the same with the mosquitos. And the general climate and uncertain political situation don't much appeal to me either.

The 3k+ core collection in the apartment will have to serve for the moment, while the remaining 9k or so stay in storage. I'm still adding, but much more selectively now.

[quote author="bcarso"]The 3k+ core collection in the apartment ......[/quote]

Is that including the porn ?

Strange ritual I do with every book....I look at the last word on the last page.
Someday a pattern will emerge, me thinks.

"Transistor Audio Amplifiers"
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y177/Midiot/DSCN3414.jpg
Last word in that book..."levels."


=FB=

That's a good book from RF Shea.

I have his 1966 edition of Amplifier Handbook. Same as PRR's new purchase. Not for DIY but 1500 pages of treat about the theory and analysis of all types of amplification, from audio to microwave.

On the same run I got something different:

Pattern for Panic, Richard S. Prather, 1954, Berkley

Dime novel ($0.25 new). Cliff Morgan, tough-guy private eye, lands in a Mexican prison. Being 1954 (he drives a new Nash), natch it is a Commie Plot. Involves the man who conquered Polio (not Salk), his lucious daughter, her lacivious friend, and the mysterious Culebra.

(Was re-issued in 1961, re-written with Prather's Shell Scott character which was the same guy with different hair only now more famous; he even had a magazine.)

The plot is about distributing alternate clues and action evenly between front and back covers. If you know Shell, you know the first girl he gets in bed with turns out to be a villain... would save a lot of pages if Shell ever figured out that the real detective was between his legs. However in Panic, that's minor. Even the larger mystery is clear (to the reader) by half-way through the book. But the way events play out is top-notch lowbrow writing. The final interrogation and struggle between hero and bad-guy comes up to Spillane's best (without the psychosis).

Well, I miss my Radio Shack "Dictionary of Electronics" that I had when I was in high school, I still use my National Semiconductor linear Integrated Circuits and Linear Applications books from 1973 and 1975, my Yamaha IC guide book and occasionally the Miniwatt technical data handbook from 1962, it has cardboard covers like a Little Golden Book. (You can tell from this list that I am a tech rather than a designer). I also used to love a magazine called "Atomic Science" which my uncle brought home from university. Great photos of guys in short haircuts and lab coats with slide rules and pocket protectors standing around scary machines.

Otherwise I love hard Sci-Fi, Iain M Bank's Culture novels, Clifford Simak's "Cities", William Gibson, The Hyperion novels, Kin Stanley Robinson's "Mars" books, all good stuff.

For a fascinating read, here is the Wiki for the author James Tiptree Jr. who wrote excellent sci-fi, was actually a woman and was ex military intelligence, and had a suicide pact with her husband, who she killed before killing herself. the novel "Brightness falls from the air" is a good example of her work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Tiptree,_Jr

Ah Shell Scott. :grin: My favorite line : "She was plastered like a California duplex..." I've got a box of Prather paperbacks packed away somewhere - gonna have to dig them out again. They're a fun read!

Another great hoot was the Harvard Lampoon parody of Spillane et al., in one of their look-alike magazine Special Parody edtions. I believe the title of the story was "Dial 'I' for Information", and featured such lines (characterizing the omnipresent and proverbially stupid blonde) as "Rolling her brain down the edge of a razor blade would be like rolling a BB down the middle of an eight-lane superhighway."