from the late seventies and early eighties

Mcgraw Hills' Electronics magazine used to be compulsory reading for anybody that was even remotely interested in electronic engineering. The target audience was engineering professionals but when I was a mere student it was compelling reading. The magazine is now defunct, this was a slow decline from the early ninties when the target audience declined. I think was due largely to bad editorial decisions, they began to concentrate exclusively on ASIC designers  and the number of people on the planet that get to send a chip design to a sillicon foundry is rather limited compared to the number of EEs that actually design biuld and maintain equipment containing those ICs. I lost interest in this journal about 1995 and went on to other things.

Recently during a colleagues office clean out, a very large archive of this magazine went to the paper recycling bin and I was able to intercept some of these early editions before allowing them to continue their journal to landfill. These scans of advertisements  for equipment and devices are ones that I have personally either owned, purchased, used or maintained in the course of my professional and private life.  

Its all rather sad how today's rooster become tomorrows feather duster. The onething that I note, when I was a student I noted how incredibly costly some of these items were and now thirty years later some are in my ham shack still earning their keep, usually aquired through dumpster diving over the years.