Wow! Wish I had that when I was reading Mims!! LOL - Good find Hop!
Thanks, John. I wish I had this kit sixty years ago, but most of the components (except for resistors and capacitors) didn't exist then. I really would have appreciated the solderless breadboards, but we had to make our own back then out of two brown particle-boards with a prepunched array of holes in them... the kind you use to hang tools and such from a wall in your garage.
We mounted the two boards facing each other with the holes lined up, using whatever we could find for spacers... typically some long threaded screws with jam nuts on each end. We also enlarged the holes on the bottom to allow room for a finger to press into the hole. Then we got a box of paper clips, straightened them out, and then folded them into an elongated "U" with the ends of the paper clip in the middle of one of the long sides. If you wanted to really get fancy, you tack soldered the ends together. Each end of the "U" was sized to just fit through the original hole in the board.
Then the "fun" part began: we strung heavy nylon fishing line through the paper clips on the bottom side while the other end of the paper clips protruded through the holes in the top side. We strung the nylon line in a criss-cross fashion through all the paper clips, securing one end of the line with a screw and pulling the other end tight as it was threaded through all the paper clips. Finally, the free end of the nylon line was secured to the bottom with a second screw. If everything was sized right (length of folded paper clips and spacing between the two boards) you ended up with a spiffy prototyping board.
You would push on a paper clip from the bottom to make the other end pop up above the board, insert a few component leads under the exposed loop on the end of the paper clip, then remove your finger to allow the nylon fishing line to pull the paper clip back down, securing the component wires between the paper clip and the board. Not very elegant, and sometimes the connections were problematical, but it was "gud enuf" to learn about electronics.
I spent many a late night at the Air Force Electronics Hobby Shop in Smyrna TN (my father's last duty station before he retired) under the informal tutelage of an off-duty airman who ran the hobby shop. During the day, the building with an adjacent class room was used for electronics training courses attended by on-duty airman. The hobby shop airman allowed me to "borrow" some of their paperback text books, which was a real help for the budding "electronics genius" I hoped to become. And four years or so later when I enlisted in the Air Force, this experience proved invaluable as I breezed through tech school. My only "mistake" was turning down an offer to teach basic electronics at the tech school I attended in Denver CO. Instead I went out into the field to spend three years playing with new toys at
Kincheloe AFB in the upper peninsula of Michigan.