“I’ll want your reaction.”
“Okay.”
We also attended to another matter. Eric didn’t own an amateur radio rig yet, and I offered to lend him my Heathkit, a little five-watt transmitter-receiver stashed away in the closet of my efficiency apartment.
“Is it digital?” Eric asked. Did it have, in other words, a “non-dial” like those newfangled watches?
“No.”
“I was hoping it was.”
“It’s transistorized.” That was good enough for me. Who needed a radio without a dial?
Eric took me up on my offer, which included the gift of some old chassis and capacitors and other parts, forgotten until now in the crawl space of my parents’ home. And I was pleased that Eric accepted, for I liked the symmetry of it all. Two decades earlier Lynn Wilson had given me some of the very equipment I’d be passing on to Eric. And so I visited my parents’ basement that weekend and reentered the past, not only my own but also that of electronics, including computers in a sense; for perhaps this is how the micro age had truly begun—hobbyists swapping parts back and forth until someone accumulated enough to build a system that actually worked.[[84]]
Lynn Wilson was all over the crawl space. I picked up a 6146 transmitter tube on which he had playfully magic markered, “For David, K4DIG, DX King.” DX was the amateur radio jargon for long-distance communications.
I lingered in that basement, thinking that somehow, examining the past, I might better understand the future. There were no new clues, however, nothing but bulky transformers and spaghettilike wires and resistors and capacitors and the other odds and ends of my youth. But what a record my junk pile was of the American electronics industry. Half gutted, near the 6146, reposed a silvery ARC-5, a war-surplus receiver. Had it flown? ARC-5s were what American bombers carried during the Second World War. Had a B-17 crew kept in touch with England with my ARC-5 while pummeling the Third Reich? Had my receiver seen action over Tokyo? Scrapping it, had I inadvertently defiled History? Near the ARC-5 I saw a giant condenser for a transmitter. With row after row of plates on a metal shaft, it looked like an electronic potato slicer. I thought of fingernail-sized chips in computers today; the big potato slicer might as well be an artifact from another species. There in the crawl space the 1950s showed up in little vacuum tubes the size of pill bottles. They were a reminder of the short-sightedness of the U.S. electronics executives who had stayed years too long with vacuum-tube technology. Just what did this mean to American computer makers facing similar challenges? There was an object lesson here. Many portable computers from U.S. companies had flat screens, for example, but most of the display designs came from the laboratories of Japan. Although IBM would prosper—even if half of the innards of its PCs came from the Orient—many of the smaller American manufacturers might die. And even the larger domestic companies could suffer in the price ranges where computers were mere commodities; with flat displays and better memory chips, Nippon might again make us relive the transistor fiasco. I groped, poked, and wandered some more. And there in a dim corner I found the 1960s, too—in the form of a Nuvistor, another pygmy vacuum tube, another refinement of the obsolete. By the 1970s Heathkit was finally offering transistorized ham transmitters like the one I’d lend Eric. Heath still sold quite a few updated versions of the little HW-7. But now the amateur radio magazines seemed half filled by ads for solid-state equipment from Japan. How long until computer magazines looked the same?