Jim Williams at his bench. Note the mess.
The Bob Pease book that KD4EBM gave me led me to the Jim Willams book entitled Analog Circuit Design -- Art, Science, and Personalities. I'm only about a quarter of the way through it, but I can already tell that it is great. Get this book. Make room on your shelf.
Jim was the editor, and it is a collection of contibutions made by a many different analog luminaries. Curiously, none of the bios show that there are any hams among them (but the articles of many of them seem to hint at ham radio backgrounds). MIT shows up a lot in the bios. Jim notes in the very first line of the preface that "This is a weird book." He talks about how it came together -- he met with the contributors and each of them pledged NOT to consult with the others about what they would write. Jim notes that the result is "a somewhat discordant book," that "Hopefully would lend courage to someone seeking to do analog work." " The single greatest asset a designer has is self knowledge." "Take what you like, cook it any way you want to, and leave the rest." Indeed.
I found that Jim's own contributions were among those that I liked the most. He writes about "analoggery" and "digital fakery" but then acknowledges that this is a "good natured" controversy. He notes that "no true home is complete without a lab" (a shack?) and that "no lab is complete without an HP series 200 oscillator." His bio reveals that he lived in California with his family and "14 Tektronix oscilloscopes." In a chapter entitled "Should Ohm's Law be Repealed?" Jim describes the very early influence of a neighbor, Dr. Stearn, who owned a Tek 535. It allowed them to see into circuits: "You knew the excitement Leeuwenhoek felt when he looked in his microscope." But that was not always enough: Jim tells how Stearn once successfully troubleshot one of Jim circuits simply by running moistened fingers over circuit while watching the scope.
Tom Hornak also really struck a chord with me. He writes of things that happened in the year "10 BT" (Before Transistors). He talks about how he and a childhood friend had trouble understanding the differences between voltage and current. "We found someone who knew the right answer, but he did not help us too much. Instead of using a simple analog such as a phasor diagram, he started to talk sine and cosine. We accused him of not knowing the answer either, and covering up his ignorance my muttering mumbo-jumbo." Tom explaines: "I know that trying to 'understand electricity' early in life had a lasting benefit to me. I got used to 'seeing electricity' in analogs and I am still seeing it that way. I believe every electronic circuit designer could benefit from thinking in analogs, and it is never too late to start. This belief made me write this chapter."
Barrie Gilbert -- the man credited with inventing the Gilbert Cell (the heart of the NE602) -- has a chapter in the book. He writes of circuits "laid out Manhattan-style" and "built on softwood bases." He hombrewed a very early TV receiver. He tested AF amplifiers "by lacing a finger on the grid of the first tube." (We recommended something similar with the SolderSmoke Direct Conversion Receiver, but some builders seemed not to believe that this would work!)
It is undoubtedly a tragedy that we lost both Jim Willams and Bob Pease in June 2011. Jim died of a stroke at age 63; Bob died of a possible heart attack or stroke while driving home from Jim's memorial service. But here we are in 2025 still talking about their work and their books. In a certain sense they live on through their writing. This is a lesson and an inspiration for those of us who sometimes get a bit down by the vagaries of AI and the algorithms: We never know when -- perhaps long after we are gone -- someone might come across something we have written and find inspiration there.
Three cheers for Jim and Bob.
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