I stayed put last evening mainly trying to fix that memory circuit. It’s become a matter of honor, me or that circuit. What makes it the more frustrating is that over the years, we have become exceptionally well experienced and equipped to deal with this kind of problem and it the solution is still nowhere in sight. I’m even out of theories. Be informed this new circuit was purpose built from the ground up to eliminate any construction errors.
When circuits fail at this stage, time to look for a logic error. The worst kind of quest because you have to really think, really use the old noggin. This may shock those who rely on the Internet for the facts, but I’m wondering if the diagrams I downloaded from the super-expert professionals could all contain the same error. I don’t know the answer, but the circuit is behaving as it would if the transistors were upside down.
I’ve thrown out many a computer text because the code was proofread by an English major instead of the author. Am I up against the same thing with this flip-flop (a rudimentary RAM device)? I certainly don’t trust electronics experts any more, and an error not checking the people who check your errors is still a major mistake, get it? There’s nothing to say the logic error isn’t in somebody else’s head and if you’ve ever tried to figure out how somebody else thinks you know it don’t come easy. Insert Hippie joke here.
The rest of today’s blog will read more like a lecture, but there is a lot of information presented if you care to read it all. I met up with Professor Howard (the “Oz”) concerning marketing. Do we need a moment for reminders? Yes, I see we do. The Prof wrote a textbook some decades ago that paid off handsomely. But upon trying to repeat the success, which measured into six figures, he ran up against the entrenched publishing industry.
The conversation went through the standard phases, which quickly reveals that I appear to be, as an author, wrong, greedy, and distrustful. I say stuff it. Put another way, I don’t consider any venture of the kind to be a success unless it nets a handsome profit. There is too much work involved for any but the idle rich to do it for free. In that same sense, I am not even a successful bass player. So I don’t fit the mold—until the conversation gets to the money part. Suddenly everybody figures out who knows what’s going on. I know what not to do. Like making huge payments to a promotion firm without knowing specifically what they are doing with the money.
Here’s where plenty of clarification is due. Like all newcomers to the industry, if I write a book, I want it to be a definitive work. If it becomes a bestseller, it should reflect my professionalism and be something of a testament to my hard work, a book others would consider a reference. Now hold on—I never said that. I was checking to see if that is what others thought. While I would like any book I write to be an epic, I would no longer insist on it.
How so? Well, ask yourself, my long-term readers, how many times I’ve grumbled that computer books are not proofread beyond Chapter Three? How many texts are written to pass the exam rather than teach anything? Aha, this is the change that has come over my thinking in the past decade. If people only read the first couple of chapters, as long as those are well-written, you’ve made your mark. By that logic, why write the whole book unless there is a demand for follow-on chapters. This dove-tails with my now-shelved plan to sell “how-to” books one chapter at a time. Is any of this ringing a bell?
Hmmm, you’re still here. Selling one chapter at a time is no different than how newspaper columns operate. A nice aspect to only writing one chapter at a time is you no longer have to be an expert on a given topic. Is that ethical? I don’t know and I point out I’m not planning on doing any of this. I merely want it recorded that the ground has been covered. Wanting to be paid for work done is not greed in my universe. Nor is wanting extreme pay for extreme work.
Having said that, how does one go about selling a chapter at a time? Would this not cost just as much as plugging the whole book? I say put it to the test. Are you more likely to pay $1 for a chapter or $30 for the whole book if there is no guarantee you will finish it? The Professor’s book, in the long run, netted him $4,675 per chapter. But it took a very long time, and in my thinking, it was the first couple chapters that brought in the bulk. In my theory, I’d sell ten thousand people Chapter One for a dollar. You and I have gone over this before, but now I have some real numbers to ponder.
In fact, we’ve already talked in much more depth than I’m going to go right now. My contention is that if you have something to sell, then do so. Forget about old-fashioned concepts like quality or content. Sell hard and fast regardless of the consequences. It works for MicroSoft. It boils down to marketing, the most parasitic of American industries. We gave agreed to collaborate on a simple venture or two. Since he has already written the books and I have plenty of short videos, we have very little to lose. Famous/infamous is has much the same outcome after one is fifty. I also pointed out that most advertising does not target the rural population. I very well recollect the demand from the farm about how fancy folks live in the big city. It worked for Sears & Roebuck.
Last, I have not been following the missing airliner news, but I did see the map of where it went down. Now I know there is something funny going on. It changed direction and started flying over an ocean where there is absolutely nothing? Heading toward Antarctica? Watch for the crackpot theories to emerge. Myself, I’d apply Occam’s Razor. To me the simplest explanation is hijacking. Now explain how all the search parties were in the wrong area.
ADDENDUM
Aha! I got the circuit working. It was transistors built backwards causing the problem. They were from that free batch received last year, now I know why they were free. Here is what the circuit looks like. There are millions of these in your computer, it is RAM. I’ve already built ROM, this is RAM, but not a very sophisticated type. For those interested, I’ll describe this. Elsewise, you won’t much care to follow along. These four transistors, the black dots, are grouped into two NOR gates, the upper and lower halves in this photo are the same arrangement in duplicate.
I had difficulty designing this arrangement since most sources use block diagrams to explain flip-flop memory. That is, they don’t show the internal workings, or if they do, they don’t show how to hook it up to anything. I put this together using information from earlier chapters, then hooking them together with the green wiring. Only now do I completely understand how it works. I’m surprised that nobody teaches it in this fashion.
The way it works is the NOR gate, which you can easily look up so I won’t elaborate. It has two inputs and the light is off unless both inputs are off. If one or both inputs are activated, the light goes out. In itself, not that useful. Two inputs, one output that follows the rules of a truth table. Remember those?
The fun begins when you wire two of these gates together. The output of one gate affects the input of the other. The convenient way to think of it as a switch that disables itself. You can only use one switch to turn the light on, you must use another switch to turn the light off. The upper half is the on-switch, the lower is the off-switch. Hence, the light “remembers” which switch was hit last. Of course, there is another option because it is RAM, you could just yank the plug and lose the memory. Anybody with a computer knows that part.
And if you connect enough of these together you could theoretically build a computer. I intend to build four of these RAM circuits, so I can represent the numbers from 0 – 7. I fully expect to get no help on-line trying to connect these together or make them work as a unit. I still consider this a milestone, in that if I had to, I could now build memory circuits. To those who belittle anything that is self-taught, this is as self-taught as it gets.
For the technical types, I am fully aware that ROM is not really memory. My referral to it as such is from following convention.
