About Me

About me

To contact me via email you can use either cpudrbobdavis(at)juno.com or bobdavis321(at)gmail.com, replace the (at) with a @. The email address is modified to hide it from "robots" that search the internet to find your address to send it spam. It is illegal to spam a cell phone or a fax, why not make it illegal to send email spam? What is the problem here folks?

I have always liked playing with electronics. As a child I took toys apart to see how they worked. My mom tells of me playing with the cord to her iron and getting a shock from it when I was about 3 years old. In grade school I hated reading until I discovered books about cars! In High School I read every electronics book I could find in the town library. My first projects were vacume tube audio amplifiers, I once traded one for a riding lawnmower! I was a "geek" before the work geek was invented. In school I carried an green electronic stencil and used it to draw schematics in study hall. I even had glasses with tape in the middle.

At one point I built a super high voltage generator, a tesla coil, using a coil from the Christmas wrapping paper form wound the whole length with wire. I was going to get even with my brother for not knocking on my bedroom door before entering. He would try to just walk in as he always did and be electrocuted. Instead my sister knocked and wanted to know what I was doing in there that was causing every TV and Radio in the house to go crazy!

I served for 6 years in the US Navy as a computer technician, they called it a "Data Systems Technician". In those days military computers were water cooled and bigger that a large refrigirator. During some of that time I served onboard the USS Farragut. By that time I was building my own computers from my own designs, before that I had built some calculators. I also wrote a small book on how to improve the computer systems onboard the ships. The picture to the right is of my very first homemade computer. There are three cards using 44 pin edge connectors in it. It used switches and LED's for programming. The module to the right is a memory expansion card. Note the use of a linear power supply.

Eventually my inventions were collected into my first book "Favorite Electronic Circuits". Later my second book was written, "Digital and Computer Projects". It is available on www.Amazon.com, you can follow the link on my home page. Sometimes I write articles for "Nuts and Volts", and other magazines. In recent years I had a fight with Lyme disease but am now mostly recovered. I can think well enough to create this web page and write programs again.

I have written programs in just about every programming language. My favorites remain "FoxPro", "HTML", and "Quick Basic". I prefer languages that give you direct control over the hardware. I hate "wizards" and other such programs that try to do everything for you, because they do a very bad job of it. My programming philosophy is K.I.S.S. as in "Keep It Simple Stupid". My programs are all straight to the point to get the job done. They are not written to be pretty or to impress anyone.

I was married (Somehow?) to a beautiful wife named Kelly and we had three beautiful daughters. One has already graduated from college, one is just about to graduate from college, and one has just completed high school. They all know enough to avoid geeks.

Some of my email addresses to contact me are cpudrbobdavis(at)juno.com or bobdavis321(at)gmail.com but replace the (at) with a @ amoung others. My email has about 100-200 messages a day, about 90% of it is spam. Some messages come from readers of this web site, that live in other countries. I can also be frequently found on Ebay as bobdavis321.

This picture is of one of the oldest amplifiers that I have made.  My brother used it in his Christian band back when we were teenagers in high school.  It had been in use at a church until just recently when they replaced it.

This picture below is of the oldest quiz machine that I made for my sunday school teacher way back when I was a teenager. It has hooks on the front so you could hang each contestant's name on. Doorbell switches served as the input devices. It used several IC's to make it work. Modern quiz machines are hand held one IC and battery powered.