In Radio & TV News John T. Frye wrote a column on a fictional repair shop where the proprietor, Mac, would interact with other technicians and customers.Other construction projects included "The Fish Finder", an underwater temperature probe; the "Transistorized Tremolo" for an electric guitar; and a one tube VHF receiver to listen to aircraft.John T. Frye's fictional characters, Carl and Jerry,[8] use a PH meter to locate the source of pollution in a river.Dan Meyer saw the business opportunity in providing circuit boards and parts for the Popular Electronics projects.He continued to write articles and ran the mail order kit business from his home in San Antonio, Texas.Forrest Mims, a founder of MITS (Altair 8800), tells about his "Light-Emitting Diodes" cover story (Popular Electronics, November 1970) in an interview with Creative Computing.At one of our midnight meetings I suggested that we emulate Southwest Technical Products and develop a project article for Popular Electronics.The article would give us free advertising for the kit version of the project, and the magazine would even pay us for the privilege of printing it!The November 1970 issue also has an article by Forrest M. Mims and Henry E. Roberts titled "Assemble an LED Communicator - The Opticon.Don Lancaster, Daniel Meyer, Forrest Mims, Ed Roberts, John Simonton and other authors switched to Radio-Electronics.[15] Les Solomon, the Popular Electronics Technical Editor, wrote 6 articles in the rival Radio-Electronics using the pseudonym "B. R.In September 1973 Radio-Electronics published Don Lancaster's TV Typewriter, a low cost video display.(However, Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs incorrectly identified the magazine that ran the article as Popular Mechanics.)[18] In January 1972 the cover logo added a second line, "including Electronics World", and the volume number was restarted at 1.[19] The longtime tag line, "World's Largest Selling Electronics Magazine", was moved from the Table of Contents page to the cover.The February 1975 issue featured an "All Solid-State TV Camera"[20] by three Stanford University students: Terry Walker, Harry Garland and Roger Melen.While the Cyclops Camera, as it was called, was designed to use an oscilloscope for the image display, the article mentions that it could also be connected to the Altair computer.They also designed a full color video display for the Altair, "The TV Dazzler",[21] that appeared on the cover of the February 1976 issue.Popular Electronics had many other computer projects such as the Altair 680, the Speechlab voice recognition board[25] and the COSMAC ELF.By the end of 1977, fully assembled computers such as Apple II, Radio Shack TRS-80, and the Commodore PET were on the market.In 1982, Popular Electronics helped to introduce personal computer programming with its Programmer’s Notebook column written by Jim Keogh .[26] Popular Electronics continued with a full range of construction projects using the newest technologies such as microprocessors and other programmable devices.One of the last major projects was a bidirectional analog-to-digital converter for the Apple II computer published in July and August 1983.Editor Alexander W. Burawa and contributors Forrest Mims, Len Feldman, and Glenn Hauser moved to Modern Electronics.In 1982, Ziff was diagnosed with prostate cancer so he asked his three sons (ages 14 to 20) if they wanted to run a publishing empire.
A
Popular Electronics
project designed by Don Lancaster and sold by Daniel Meyer's Southwest Technical Products Corp.
Popular Electronics
had a major update starting in 1971 including merging with
Electronics World
.