I was a high school student intern at Hewlett-Packard when it was a pretty small company. I was totally excited because from my electronic hobbies I knew they made the best professional test equipment. I was assigned to various flunky jobs, but one I liked was mounting an ‘example part’ on each drawer in their supply room. I got to use a power drill to mount little knobs and switches.   I was glad not to be working in the scary room with the poisonous bath they used to de-grease parts.

On my own time I was ‘inventing’ in my mind a cool instrument that would display voltages digitally. I used an oscilloscope there to test that the voltage on a charging capacitor would increase smoothly with time, at least at first. That meant I could count the time to reach the incoming voltage to produce a digital value. This led me to apply to a Westinghouse contest with my digital meter project design. I passed their written test, but lost interest while I was trying to build the device — too many problems cropped up.

The best thing that happened at HP was their yearly sale of surplus stuff. I saw a coveted oscilloscope in the pile, secretly tested it, and bought it for a few dollars. Of course the device didn’t initially work, but I loved tracing and fixing problems so this became a new exciting project. There were hundreds of wires and parts to evaluate, but finally I found a power supply wire that was pinched between two parts, shorting it out. Eureka!

Fixing that gave me an excellent visual tool for years to monitor my other circuit projects. Finally it blew out its main transformer and truly died. What fun it had been.

Several years later I would return to HP, working as a paid research assistant in the development lab with my own assigned project, exploring the just-invented light-sensitive diode. Exciting!

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