Gee I really miss Heathkits beep boop blink beep beep hummmm beep blink

Click on image, good happens.

Boy I really miss Heathkits.

For a couple of years by accident, I lived a mile from one of the rare Heathkit retail stores -- a paradise just around the corner filled with aisles of the most amazing gizmos that beeped and blinked and did such astonishing things. Over the years I must have bought and built a dozen Heathkits, and of course I still have all of them.

Need a sine wave or a square wave at a precise frequency? Contact me, I got the Gizmo. I had to buy and build the sine-square-wave generator to do the final calibration steps for my Heathkit audio oscilloscope. (A Mad Scientist can't possibly Rule The World without an oscilloscope.)

Eventually my kit-building addiction worsened and I drifted into the equally amazing kit stereo equipment built by Dynaco and its audio design genius David Hafler. I'm still running a Hafler solid-state power amp that I built all by myself. (Check out the price$$$$$$$ the ancient Dynaco vacuum-tube/valve power amps are fetching on the Internet.)

And then eventually the addiction to kit-building REALLY got bad and I built my first computer from a kit -- an IMSAI kit computer built around an 8080 microprocessor. (You can see my computer in the kid's bedroom in the movie "War Games.")

Now everybody wants their gizmos ready to plug in straight out of the box. Yawn. That is soooo pathetic. It's the End Of Civilization As We Know It. It's all downhill from here.

If you're a faithful Vleeptroid, you've noticed occasional references to some of my imaginary Heathkits -- the Heathkit TM-16 Time Machine, for example, which I use to travel forward in time to buy tickets to Cher's Absolutely Final Farewell Concert.

Or backwards to a time when my super-precise Atomic Wall Clock won't work, and I can't figure out why. It works in the Present, it works in the Future (I tried it out at a Cher Farewell Concert), but it doesn't work in the Past, at least not before around 1920.

And I know I've bragged about and shown images of a REAL Heathkit that's just my very favorite gizmo of all: The Heathkit Vacuum-Tube ANALOG computer.

I didn't build it. The old guy who did, in 1960, sold it to me because he was terrified that after he died, his family would sell it at a tag sale for $3. Or use it as a garden planter. Now it has a new, loving home for another few decades. With someone who loves and understands it.

And the damn thing still works like a champ! The tubes/valves light up like a Christmas tree! (If one of them ever burns out, I can buy replacements from the Peoples Republic of China, the same place I get my Badger Hair from for my Shaving Brush.) I need an adapter for the plug, which is ungrounded, just like the plug on grandma's lamp.

I made the elder gentleman a bid for it by e-mail, and he very politely laughed at me. The guy knew what it was worth. Of course he knew what it was worth. He built the damned thing. So I raised my bid.

Fortunately I wasn't married to S.W.M.B.O. yet, so I didn't have to explain to anybody why I needed (yes, needed) to spend $550 for a 1960 vacuum-tube Analog Computer.

It is just possible she might not have understood. I could be wrong about that.

It don't need no steenkin' algorithms or iterations. It don't need no steenkin' software. It don't need no steenkin' zeroes and ones. And it gives me all my answers INSTANTLY! I ask the Question, the Heathkit Analog Computer spews back the Answer. It adds, subtracts, multiplies, divides, differentiates and integrates, and more -- INSTANTLY! It computes the movements of the planets and moons, it computes the time displacement of massive objects falling in gravity fields.

And if my ship is being attacked by enemy fighter planes, it will automatically direct my antiaircraft guns and aim the shells to where the enemy plane WILL BE by the time the shell reaches that part of space, no matter how wildly and cleverly the enemy pilot zigs and zags and wiggles to get out of the way.

It's an incredibly difficult problem in statistics and probability. You want to shoot down the enemy plane. While your antiaircraft shells are taking a second or two to fly, the enemy pilot can zig and zag and dive and climb, and he very much does NOT want you to shoot him out of the sky. Norbert Weiner -- nicknamed the Father of Cybernetics -- apparently solved the problem of automatic antiaircraft fire control, and it played a huge part in winning the war in the Pacific.

The Navy STILL uses ANALOG COMPUTERS to direct antiaircraft and anti-missile fire. Because while an enemy Exocet missile is heading straight at you, an Analog Computer never displays

... working ... please wait ...
... working ... please wait ...
... working ... please wait ...

There are Heathkit Homage and Worship Sites all over the Web. Maybe I should send this to one of them, see if the dude has a sense of humor. He may as well display my imaginary Heathkit, 'cause Heathkit is long dead and gone and will not be selling any more real kits.

Oh, one time I was on Internet Chat, and I typed something, and I got this reply:

SCUMMO: HEY! YOU BROKE
MY NEW SARCASMOMETER!!!

Hmmmm ... the only thing missing from my Heathkit Sarcasmometer is the unit that Sarcasm is measured in. What metric (or English) unit do they use to measure Sarcasm and Sincerity?