Barrie Gilbert and Tinkering, Surplus, and the Visceral Experience of Electronics

From https://www.edn.com/analog-back-to-the-future-part-two/ :

“Gilbert believes that childhood hardships—including at age three losing his father in World War II, leaving his mother and three other children penniless—force one to be resourceful. Before and during his teenage years, he had access to a plethora of inexpensive military surplus gear which greatly helped to make him inventive. Gilbert laments that today’s aspiring engineers are lacking the visceral experience of handling and hefting large coils and tuning capacitors, transformers and vacuum tubes, and such. Today’s surplus circuit boards are all but useless as a source of inspiration, or even “spare parts” to tinker with.”

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A really wonderful autobiography by Barrie Gilbert starts on page 7 of this page: https://hephaestusaudio.com/media/2009/06/the-gears-of-genius.pdf