Here I try to convince my baby brother, Jason, in 1971 that sharp, ugly circuit boards are truly interesting. He wasn't impressed!
The Bell System was still a monopoly in the 70's and multi-wire copper cable was easily available from local businesses undergoing renovation. Inevitably the old Western Electric switch gear and cabling would wind up in a dumpster that I could access. That's why there is so much telephone stuff everyplace. Telephone wire was also easy to strip with my teeth, which was a common practice until I got braces as a teenager.
Naturally, I had no access to any real power tools or sheet metal, so everything was made of masking tape and cardboard. I had no money either, so everything was salvaged from local trash bins. Instead of a paper route, I had a "garbage route" where I'd hit radio/tv repair shops, IBM, and AB-Dick trash bins daily. Miles of travel on a Schwinn Fastback "banana seat" bike served as transportation and anything too heavy to carry on the bike was simply dragged home by its power cable. I knew the trash pickup schedules and adjusted my route accordingly.
This all happened in Evanston, Illinois which doesn't resemble anything like it did in the 70's. All the businesses I robbed garbage from are long gone and have been replaced with high class eateries, specialty shops and other upscale businesses.
Amazingly, none of us came away with any major injuries, although myself, Raymond Sue, Jason & Ken Kreiger, Tom Smith, Michael Coupe, John Sullivan and my cousin Andrew Whitmer probably still have scars from getting cut with sharp metal or broken glass.
These forts were too heavy to collapse on ourselves, and I got more serious about electronics, learning more and more every year. I got ahold of a Systems Schematics manual for an American Airlines DC-10 and began to study how real aircraft systems worked. This manual was infinitely more intersting to me than the traditional literature Evanston Township High School threw at me and, unfortunately, there were no "fort building clubs" at ETHS. I had a good electronics shop teacher at ETHS, Kelvin Gilchrist, though who allowed me to explore new avenues in electronics such as digital circuits, which would be critical in my upcoming simulator projects.
Also, I got ahold of my first computer in 1980, which opened up a whole new world of simulator possibilities. That was back when 64K of memory was tops and Z-80 8-bit processors running at 4MHz were considered state-of-the-art. The 5" floppy disks I used on my old NEC computers only held 160K each! Was awesome at the time, though, and learning to program in BASIC and Pascal was terribly important. Math geniuses, like Brian Chojnowski, solved complex graphics generation problems for me while I mostly programmed logic functions and worked on hardware interfaces.
My grandmother (pictured above at the sim's instructor console) was responsible for my initial interest in electronics by providing me with junk she found at the Collins Avionics manufacturing facility she worked in. As fate would have it, I would wind up moving to Cedar Rapids, Iowa as an adult to work as an engineer at the same company.
By age 17, I had a good understanding of digital interfaces, so I assembled discrete interface boards to the old NEC computers and was on my way to building my first computer-controlled sim.
Finding affordable electromechanical aircraft instruments in the early 80's was a virtual impossibility since they were still in vogue with the aircraft of the time. However, I noticed that newer aircraft were coming out with CRT displays and that was something I could emulate easily.
Unfortunately, I never finished my final teenage sim as I had to depart for college. That final sim was stripped for parts when my parents sold the house in Evanston and moved to Vermont. I headed my own direction, got married, moved to Cedar Rapids, and settled into my own house before sim construction began again in 1996.