Charlie reached out to me and asked if I would like to be Technical Editor of Vacuum Tube Valley, and I happily agreed. First class bunch of people, including the irrepressible Eric Barbour, one of the most notorious curmudgeons in the industry ... he made me look like a mild-mannered moderate. But all of them were, and are, great people.
Back when I was on the Editorial Board of Positive Feedback (a few years earlier), Eric sent in an article so outrageous that we couldn’t publish it, but it was the funniest thing about the biz I had ever seen. No, it still can’t be published, here or anywhere else. We’d get sued for sure. Eric is one of a kind.
Well, OK, there’s Harvey Rosenberg, but his sense of humor was much more gentle. Meeting him in person at the Consumer Electronics Show in the late Nineties was pretty memorable. He would drop the clown act and get quite serious, but if he saw someone he recognized, he do something outrageous right on the spot, then switch right back. The clown act fooled a lot of people, as it was meant to. He was a very sharp observer and knew what was going on.
Once you get away from the oh-so-serious gatekeepers, there are some remarkable people you meet in the biz. The fun thing about Eric, Harvey, and myself is we were outsiders, and we didn’t have to take it seriously.
Frankly, that was part of my motivation to design the Amity and Karna ... to show, by example, that things could be done differently. At the height of the SET mania in the Nineties, Harvey was the only one who (very strongly) encouraged me to follow my own path. That encouragement, from an old pro like Harvey, made all the difference.
