To me, it has always been a good news/bad news situation.  I
remember as a boy the ease with which one could work on vacuum-tube
equipment and also the frequency with which one needed to work on it.

        As am amateur radio operator who is also blind, I remember the
common practice of connecting a voltage controlled oscillator, itself
made of discrete transistors or even tubes to the meter or meters that
showed anode current and grid drive for the final power amplifier
stage.  The idea was to listen for a peak in the tone frequency or to
indirectly read the numerical value of the meter by comparing the tone
generated by the voltage across the meter movement against a
calibrated source with a pointer and raised dots around the dial.
When the pitch of the meter matched the pitch as heard from the
calibrated test dial, then we could "read" the meter by checking the
position of the pointer on the scale.

        Even with discrete transistors, one could always find some tap
point in the circuit to get a desired signal.  There are even some
construction articles which would give speech to older digital
multimeters or frequency counters by connecting the speech controller
to the segment drivers, if accessible, or even the segment lines and
also to the strobes.  The result would be messy, but did work for some
people.

        The bad news is that things are so well integrated today that
there aren't many if any practical places to tap signals that wouldn't
physically ruin the display.  The good news is that one can now buy
digital meters and frequency counters that have computer ports.  This
is the way to go.  I only hope that through-hole components and
wire-wrap technology stays around for a few more years.  On a personal
level, I can handle the size of components and pin spacing with this
form of technology with no real problem but that surface mount stuff
just feels like blobs of plastic with slightly rough edges.:-)  One
can take a scribe or pin which I sometimes call my Braille microscope
and tell something about the number of leads or the presence of an
index mark, but I don't know any practical way to build or repair
surface mount equipment.

        The only good news there is that some chips have matching
sockets that can be put in to a wire-wrap nest.

        These are the good old days of tinkering.  Now, if I can just
get a decent operating system on my computers that wasn't designed by
total idiots.  I think I am going Linux for there is still hope with
it.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK
OSU Center for Computing and Information Services Data Communications Group