I'm an experienced electronic engineer with a particular interest in scientific instruments, from phased-array medical ultrasound scanners, through electron-microscopes and their cousins, the electron-beamer tester and the electron-beam microfabricator, to basic stuff like millidegree thermostats, photosensors and magnetic field sensors. Even cranky components like photodiodes, photomultipliers and interchangeable thermistors rarely surprise me these days.
If you wanted to look at some of the work I did at Cambridge Instruments Pty. Ltd. from 8/11/1982 to 8/11/1991, on electron microscopes and similar gear, I've written it up here. It's more a history than an exposition – when I left in 1991 I took three years of my weekly reports with me, and what I've put here includes all of them, plus enough background material (which goes back to 1968) to allow the reader to understand most of what the weekly reports were talking about. Quite a few of the people involved are still alive, and some of them aren't depicted all that favourably, so it has to be kept in mind that this is my view of what was going on, coloured by the fact that the work we did from 1988 to 1991 never made anybody any money, though we did pretty much what we'd been asked to do in 1988 by creating a machine which worked, and collected data quite a bit faster than it's predecessors and it's competition.
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