The future used to be so much cooler

[Gordonjcp]

I recently acquired a box of old Hobby Electronics magazines.  I'm going to scan in some pertinent articles, which have good designs for filters, amplifiers, mixers and effects.  Great stuff.  In the meantime, and following on from my nostalgic musings on Maplin catalogues of old, here are some scans of old Maplin adverts:

http://www.gjcp.net/media/maplin/maplin1_sm.jpg
(HE February '81)

http://www.gjcp.net/media/maplin/maplin2_sm.jpg
(HE April '80)

Larger versions at http://www.gjcp.net/media/maplin

In the second pic you'll notice (from front to back) a kind of two octave stylophone thing, a "home organ" drum machine (the thing with the triangular touch pads), an organ pedalboard, a large mixer, two analogue synths, an electric piano and a two-manual organ.  You could buy kits for all of these, or buy the components individually.

[Circuitbenders]

I nearly bought a 'faulty but working' one of those massive Maplin analogue synths from some guy off gumtree a while back. They look very cool with the patching pin matrix but when i actually went and had a look at it, it looked like it had been built by someone who had never even seen a soldering iron before. I was tempted to get it anyway but i would probably have had better luck just getting the schematics and building the thing from scratch!

Maplins were certainly a lot more fun when everything looked like a bad sci-fi novel.

[druzz]

nice !! i love vintage electronic hobbyist magazine , they look so good and the advertisements are almost always tasty.
you probably already know about it but heres a link to some scans of synapse magazine,  
http://www.cyndustries.com/synapse/intro.cfm    its not exactly an electronic hobbyist magazine but ...

i got my hands on a special eddition of elementary electronics from 1980 wich is 98% shematics , lots of it is sound related .   its called  99 ic projects and includes 30 transistor projects . i love the typo and the yellowish pages. .  might do some scans of it eventually.  

[Gordonjcp]

I did not know about Synapse.  Thanks, you've just burst my whole afternoon, and I've got Real Work to do ;-)

[electoyd]

yeah maplins certainly aint what they used to be diggin the 80's sci fi feel of the catalogue covers-almost looks like an isaac asimov book cover-the kits they sell these days are mediocre in comparison.  They could probably make a mint if they released synth kits, but they are only interested in commercial electronic crap these days, oh and charging 3 quid for a friggin switch. 

[Gordonjcp]

Sadly, I have to go round there later to get some pots for my Arduino synth VCF.  I could order from the Internet but I want them this evening  for SOLDER group.

Incidentally, I'll be constructing a few circuits from those HEs and putting it on my website over the next few weeks.  First up (this weekend, if I get peace and quiet) will be a wah-wah pedal circuit.

[Gordonjcp]

I nearly bought a 'faulty but working' one of those massive Maplin analogue synths from some guy off gumtree a while back.

Incidentally, you don't know if he still has it, do you?

[Circuitbenders]

probably long gone i'm afraid, it was about a year ago. I've never seen such a complete mess of a DIY synth before, and thats up against some pretty stiff competition as you can imagine!