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The History of What was the genesis of Silicon Chip magazine? How did it come about? Why would anyone have had the foolhardy idea to launch a new electronics magazine in a crowded Australian market in 1987? Leo Simpson, the founder of Silicon Chip, tells how the seeds were sown several years before, in 1984, when he was editor of “Electronics Australia” magazine. B ack in July 1984, while I was editor of Electronics Australia magazine, I wrote a fateful editorial about the battle between the two competing videotape formats, VHS and Beta. Sony was the inventor of the Beta format but over the years, the VHS format had grabbed the lion’s share of the market. Both formats were quite similar in principle, using a rapidly 34  Silicon Chip spinning drum carrying the video heads and thereby helically scanning the videotape as it passed part way around the drum. Today, VHS would be regarded as ‘open system’ like the IBM PC, while Beta would be compared to a ‘closed system’ like Apple’s iPhone. But while Beta was regarded as technically superior (much like Apple products today), Australia's electronics magazine VHS had gradually whittled away that lead. And then big department stores started giving major price reductions for Beta machines. What was happening out there? Until then, readers would often write or phone to ask us which VCR format they should buy. I would tend to summarise the position outlined above but would never make a ‘buy’ recommendation. That all changed when I attended a major presentation by the German company BASF with the release of a premium grade four-hour tape for VHS machines. Significantly, they did not bother with a Beta version. I closely questioned the BASF people about this, and their verdict was clear: Beta had lost the battle. Hence, I decided to write that fateful editorial. I was telling the truth, but did not reckon on the financial consequences. Sanyo, a manufacturer of Beta format VCRs and a major advertiser in Electronics Australia, immediately cancelled all their advertising. That was drastic enough, but then they really upped the ante by cancelling all advertising in all magazines published by John Fairfax’s magazine subsidiary, Sungravure. In today’s money, that would have amounted to many hundreds of thousands of dollars! I was quite shocked, but the Sungravure management must have suffered apoplexy. And yes, I was absolutely right about Beta; sales of all Beta VCRs pretty much ultimately ceased worldwide. But not too long after that editorial, in November 1984, the ownership of Electronics Australia was transferred from Sungravure Pty Ltd to the Federal Publishing Company. My editorial may not have been the only factor in that transfer decision, but it must have been a major component. Looking back, I had been quite naïve; the editorial should have been vetted by senior management. To be honest, if Neville Williams had still been the editor-in-chief of EA, the editorial would probably not have seen the light of day. Having said that, it was quite a precipitous decision by the Fairfax senior management to then transfer EA to Federal Publishing. Electronics Australia was very successful and one the most profitable magazines in the whole group. If I had been the general manager siliconchip.com.au of Sungravure, I would have summarily fired the editor! Yep, I would have given that idiot editor his marching orders and then patched things up with the advertisers. Fortunately, that did not happen, and I managed to keep almost the entire staff together for the transfer: staff writers, advertising sales and even some of the production people came across. Why? I suppose they must have liked me, but the bigger reason was that we all loved working together on ‘our’ magazine! That delusion about ‘our’ magazine was part of the reason that I wrote that fateful editorial. And that delusion was very quickly erased as we started work for the new company in the new location at Rosebery. Talk about culture shock! Nobody liked it. Federal Publishing was the magazine division of the very successful Eastern Suburbs Newspapers group. But my judgement was that while their burgeoning local newspapers were highly prosperous, they did not treat their magazine journalists at all well. The company was beset by high staff turnover and that also affected EA and Electronics Today International (ETI), which had also been absorbed by the group some years earlier. So we started to lose staff. We also lost access to our very comprehensive library, but we did manage to have a spacious new laboratory built, which we shared with ETI. The situation worsened when the operation was transferred to a huge plant in Alexandria. This was formerly the CIG plant which manufactured an extensive range of industrial gases. Alexandria was far more remote, forcing most people to drive long distances, and more people in the company left, including our very experienced draftsman, Bob Flynn. We were forced to use non-technical company layout artists. So it was difficult to function as well as we had, and we ended up with a much smaller laboratory that was not as well-equipped. The magazine was in decline. Eventually, after a great deal of thought, I decided to make an offer to purchase Electronics Australia from Federal Publishing. My offer was based on a very significant amount of cash for which I would have needed to mortgage my home. In hindsight, it was a bold (rash?) decision, but I was prepared to take the risk. siliconchip.com.au The editorial from the July 1984 issue of Electronics Australia Well, it got very short shrift. I can’t remember the exact sequence of events, but within a day or two, I was called in to senior management and dismissed. They told me to hand over the keys to my company vehicle, to clean out my desk while a security guard looked on and I was escorted off the premises. Assistant editor Greg Swain kindly drove me home, and that was that. Shortly after, Greg Swain and project designer John Clarke also decided to move on. They both resigned and left some four or five weeks after my departure, having been released early from their mandatory 12-week notice periods. That was around the end of April or early May 1987, if my memory serves me correctly. At that stage, none of us really had a clue what we were going to do, and there was every chance that we would go our separate ways. We spoke often over the phone during the following weeks and explored various business ideas. But electronics and magazine publishing were what we knew. Eventually, Greg Swain and I decided to take a big risk, to start a new magazine. We might have been familiar with running an electronics magazine, but there would be an enormous difference between taking over a long-established magazine like Electronics Australia and starting a new one from scratch in a crowded market! There were already three electronics magazines on the Australian market: EA, ETI and Australian Electronics Monthly (AEM – founded by ex-ETI Australia's electronics magazine editor Roger Harrison), plus several competing trade electronics magazines. Any casual observer would have concluded that we would fail within very short order. That Silicon Chip continues as one of the very few electronics magazines in the world today proves that such a forecast would have been wrong. Forming the new magazine We basically started with nothing. Apart from a Fluke 77 multimeter, a couple of soldering irons, an IBM PC with two floppy drives and a few reference books, that was all I had. Oh, I did have a slide rule (an anachronism even then) and a scientific calculator. Greg Swain was in much the same boat but without a computer (it was 1987, after all; few people had the cash to buy an IBM PC). My computer skills were confined to knowledge of MS-DOS and WordStar and little else. While I did have a Business Degree, I had no experience running a business where I was the owner, not an employee. That was pretty daunting. But I did have a very good knowledge of how to run technical magazines. Before I had been given the boot, I had been Managing Editor of EA, ETI, Your Computer and Sonics magazines. I also had good knowledge of magazine printing and the role of a publisher. So, where to start? Fortunately, I was introduced to a very helpful solicitor (whom I still work with today). He, in turn, introduced me to a great accountant who helped me with a good connection to a bank manager at the ANZ. August 2022  35 The Playmaster 200 with its front panel attached. It was a very ambitious project. Then I had to seriously exercise some of my business and publishing knowledge and make use of my business contacts. I had to line up a commercial printer and typesetter (this was well before the days of desktop publishing) and a magazine distributor for Australia’s thousands of newsagents. And then I had to line up advertising support. The printer we selected was Masterprint Pty Ltd, based in the NSW country city of Dubbo. While this posed some logistical problems, they were well-versed in dealing with publishers from all over Australia, and the arrangement worked well. Ironically, just a few years later, Masterprint was bought out by Hannanprint Pty Ltd – the owners of Eastern Suburbs Newspaper and Federal Publishing, the company we used to work for! Funnily enough, that caused no problems at all, as we had developed very good relationships with the whole staff at Masterprint. Greg and I looked at several offices in which to start our fledgling business but decided to be very cautious and start in the basement of my home on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. In fact, it was in three very spartan rooms adjoining my garage, with little lighting and not much else. I purchased a PC-clone with a 5.25-inch floppy and a 20MB hard drive – wow! We also purchased a 300 baud dial-up modem. Greg set about learning about computers while I plastered the ceilings with Gyprock, installed lighting and set up an office. We had two desks, two computers, a few ordinary chairs and a portable typewriter. To provide more desk space, I had a table tennis table which split into two sections. We also had an electric jug to make tea and coffee. Oh, joy. Some time later, Jack O’Donnell of Altronics visited our ‘office’ and commented favourably on our “Readymix The interior of the Playmaster 200 Amplifier was faithfully reproduced in the cartoon on the opposite page. 36  Silicon Chip Australia's electronics magazine carpet”, ie, the concrete floor, since that was how he started out. In July 1987, we incorporated Silicon Chip Publications Pty Ltd and made a start on the contents of our first issue. In fact, it was only a few weeks before that we had decided on the name of the magazine: Silicon Chip. There were already too many companies out there, publishing and otherwise, with electronics in their name. We needed something different but which still encapsulated what the magazine was about. Out of a list of dozens of possible names, only one stood out: Silicon Chip. It was not evident to most people at the time, and most had the impression that the magazine must be about computers. Well, that was part of it, but I maintained then that silicon chips would become embedded in every aspect of human lives. I had no idea just how true that would turn out to be. If you looked through the first 96-page issue in November 1987, which featured a 7-digit frequency counter on the cover, there was little to indicate how just how small our operation was. There were just four of us on the staff: Greg Swain, John Clarke, Bob Flynn and me. We also had a list of “regular” contributors, which was quite funny, considering that we had just started. All those people were previous contacts that we had known for years and fortunately, they and quite a few others stuck with us for many years. Crucially, we had very good advertising support right from the beginning from three key companies: Altronics, Jaycar and Dick Smith Electronics. We could not have started without them, but fortunately, they had faith in us. Of course, we had no laboratory and virtually no test equipment; not even an oscilloscope. That came a little later when I purchased an old Tektronix scope that weighed a ton. Fortunately, John Clarke was quite well equipped with a 2-channel oscilloscope, a protoboard (for lashing up circuits) and his much-prized Beckman DMM – much better than a Fluke DMM, according to him! We designed our prototype PCBs using the old tape process and etched them ourselves. Later, my good friend Bob Barnes (now deceased) of RCS Radio Pty Ltd would make our prototype boards and also stock them for sale to readers. siliconchip.com.au One of Brendan Akhurst’s earliest works for Leo Simpson. This cartoon was reproduced from Electronics Australia, April 1985, page 48. That’s Jim Rowe wearing a barrel. Leo is shown working on the Playmaster Series 200 stereo amplifier design. The first article of this amplifier was published in the January 1985 issue of EA. Subsequent articles were delayed due to noise problems in the moving coil preamp, and the series wasn’t finalised until the May 1985 issue. Ultimately, the projects were very well supported with kits by our three key advertisers, Altronics, Jaycar and Dick Smith Electronics. Some of the initial project designs came from contributors. A few months later, we started getting letters from readers for Circuit Notebook contributions and letters to “Ask Silicon Chip”. Magazine format We had thought very carefully about the look and style of the new magazine. I wanted it to be clear and very easy to read. At that time, Dick Smith was running a brilliant new magazine, siliconchip.com.au Australian Geographic. Dick had set very high standards for page layout, outstanding photography, excellent writing and proofreading and lastly, excellent printing. I wanted to emulate his approach. As a first step, I used the same type font for the body copy as in Australian Geographic. It was Melior, a serif font with large lower case, making it very easy to read [we still use it today, including for this article – Editor]. We decided to use a similar circuit drawing style to that used in EA, but we would have to develop all our own circuit symbols and so on. That was to Australia's electronics magazine be Bob Flynn’s task – he was an excellent draftsman. The circuit diagrams were done by hand using stick-on bromide symbols and connections made with Rotring drawing pens. PCBs were designed using stick-down tape for tracks; the overlay components and wiring were drawn by hand and by tracing drafting templates. Very early in the piece, I had the brilliant idea of getting the late Brendan Akhurst to prepare cartoons for the Serviceman pages. While getting Brendan to do this work was a wonderful idea, I must admit that it was August 2022  37 This cartoon by Brendan Akhurst was published in the June 1988 issue of Silicon Chip as part of the regular monthly Serviceman column. pioneers in the field of drone technology, Bob Young. You can read his latest story on that subject in the March 2022 issue (siliconchip.au/Article/15245). This fitted with my belief that merely concentrating on small-scale electronics was to ignore some of the far-reaching major technology developments worldwide. Getting into financial strife not original; it came from the British magazine Television. But Brendan did it so much better, and his work was so much funnier too. Greg Swain did all the magazine layouts. All the editorial copy was written and edited on the PCs, and we received most contributed material via our 300 baud modem. We would watch the text coming in on a green-screen monitor at about 30 words per minute. That was state of the art! After all the editing had been done, we would squirt the text down the phone line to our typesetters in Chippendale and a day or so later, the type galleys (continuous proofs with the type in correct size, width, etc but not ‘laid out’ in any way) would arrive by courier. Greg would then do paste-ups of the page layouts, leaving space for photos, circuits and wiring diagrams. The 16-page sections of the magazine, together with advertising material, would then be couriered back to the typesetters and they would produce full-page bromides. We would then proofread and correct photocopies of these pages before sending the final bromide layouts to the printers at Dubbo. (There’s more on our editorial production systems later in this article). Many of the early Silicon Chip designs were model railway projects. This came from my own hobby interest, but they turned out to be very popular because there was virtually no other source of DIY circuit designs. My 38  Silicon Chip The first couple of years of the magazine were not smooth sailing. In fact, they were extremely difficult. While I had a great deal of experience in running and publishing technical magazines while working at Sungravure and then at Federal Publishing, I quickly realised after only three months or so that we would go out of business very soon unless I immediately changed tack. The problem? The print run was far interest in railways, large and small, too large. Unless I reduced it drastialso led to the first long series from cally, we would crash. Bryan Maher on “The Evolution of Stupidly (rashly?), I had assumed Electric Railways” (29 articles in total; that we would quickly match the magsiliconchip.au/Series/246). azine sales of EA and ETI, and I set Some readers sneered at the first the print run accordingly. But one of few articles because they were mainly the problems of publishing I was yet about steam locomotives. Funny that, to become fully aware of is that there but that’s where electric railways is typically a gap of about two months evolved from. As the series continued, or more between a magazine going on some of those readers admitted that sale at newsagents and getting the sales the articles had become very interest- figures, then there is more delay before ing and actually incorporated lots of the publisher is paid in full. very complex electronic engineering. So at least three issues had been on That included AC-DC converters, sale, and another was due to go to print extremely heavy-duty variable fre- before I realised the extent of the brewquency inverters for driving huge ing disaster. Of course, I had to pay the synchronous traction motors, diesel-­ printer for every single magazine that electric locomotives with inverter had been printed, whether they were drives, dynamic braking, radar-­ sold or not. So I was already looking controlled anti-slip traction control at a huge loss after only a few months. (before it became commonplace in Should I close the whole thing down cars) and so on. before our home was in jeopardy? The Anyone who ploughed through that situation was that dire. entire series would have gained a very Greg Swain and I then had a hurgood understanding of today’s very riedly arranged meeting with my high-speed trains in Japan, France, solicitor and one of my closest busiChina and elsewhere in Asia and ness friends to survey the wreckage. Europe. I went home shattered. I thought that After that series, I continued the Greg had probably concluded that we themes of electronics in diverse fields, would close down the whole thing. I whether they were in power engi- was facing the ugly possibility that this neering (eg, long-distance EHV DC was the only practical way out. links), medical technology (all sorts of But after a couple of long and sleepimplants) or defence with an empha- less nights over the weekend, I came sis on drone technology. to a different conclusion. First, I had In fact, we used to have a regular to immediately and drastically cut monthly column of remote control the print run, while bearing in mind which was introduced in the Octo- that too much of a reduction would ber 1989 and written by one of the mean greatly reduced distribution Australia's electronics magazine siliconchip.com.au to Australia’s huge network of thousands of newsagents – which would mean lost sales. I also had to produce a drastically different cash-management projection since my first effort had clearly been from la-la land. I also had to start paying Greg Swain. He had initially put money into the venture, but I had to acknowledge that he could not sustain the losses so far. Severely chastened by developments to that date, we decided to continue. I should also point out that we had not taken out a business overdraft with the bank to start our operations, so we were very much swimming out there in a big and savage ocean. After that process, false rumours arose that Gary Johnston of Jaycar had put money into the magazine to keep it going. I could see how those rumours might have arisen. After all, Gary was a very good friend of mine, but I was mortified nonetheless. If it had been true, it would have significantly impinged on our ability to sell advertising space to other companies. Having said that, he did surprise me with a generous gift very early in the piece. Having visited us in our ‘offices’, he decided that we really needed a fax machine and so one arrived by courier the next day. I was quite overcome and immediately phoned him at home, to thank him! It was almost two years before the magazine started to break even and I could start paying myself. It took quite a few more years to make up the losses, but we survived and eventually prospered. Along the way, I gained a great deal more practical knowledge about financial management and the realisation that there are no guarantees that any business will continue. And, of course, there would still be many hurdles to overcome. Those early days were really very tough and stressful for all four of us, and we worked much harder than we ever did at Electronics Australia magazine. My wife Kerri was also heavily involved, handling a lot of the work of packing the thousands of subscription copies; she continued to do that for well over 20 years before we put it into the hands of a mailing house in Melbourne. I should state that while producing the magazine was a lot of hard work, it was not all misery. There was siliconchip.com.au also plenty of humour and repartee. I remember one particular instance that was quite funny. Because we were working in pretty cramped conditions and were all anxious to get through the work, there was often a lot of swearing, usually over trivial matters. With my wife and three daughters (upstairs) in mind, I decided that it was all going too far, and I instituted the ‘swear jar’. Anyone who swore had to put 10c in the jar for each and every swear word. It got really frustrating. You would swear, realise that you had just sworn and then curse again, which entailed a double penalty. But Bob Flynn, initially one of the worst offenders, became quite insufferable. Instead of swearing, he would exclaim “Upon my soul” or “Oh, goodness me!” or some other mealy-mouthed expression. After about a week of this, I got thoroughly exasperated with the whole scheme and canned it. I should say that John Clarke was not there every day at that time, and he didn’t swear anyway. The saint. Bob Flynn admitted afterwards that he would swear almost continuously each time he drove home, until the process came to an end. The sod. I can’t remember what we did with the contents of the swear jar. We might have bought a cake for someone’s birthday. That was a tradition that we continued right up until the pandemic hit in 2020. Chocolate mud cake was always a popular choice. Editor: It didn’t end there – when I started working at Silicon Chip in 2010, my desk was between Leo Simpson’s and Greg Swain’s, and I often copped the swearing in stereo! I should explain about John Clarke not being present during the swearing saga. In about December 1988, John announced that he was resigning and was going on a lengthy world trip (including what was to be an arduous journey through Africa) with his newlywed wife Robyn, and he did not know whether he would ever return. That was a bitter blow, but we had to carry on as best we could. Shortly after that, a New Zealand student, Malcolm Young, joined us and filled in the gap left by John Clarke. Inevitably, his accent was the source of much mirth. Fortunately, he took it all in good spirit and gave as good as he got. John Clarke eventually returned in about May the following year and is still working on the staff today. Thanks so much, John. Sometime in 1988, I suffered severe back problems and ended up in hospital for a few weeks, during which I could barely walk. I wasn’t much better when I came home and would spend another couple of weeks slowly recovering. It was at that time that I had the idea for another project. Shut in the bedroom, I could not attract anyone’s attention, including that of my wife when I might have wanted a cup of tea or other ministration. The result was the “Remote Controlled Chimes Unit” designed by John Clarke, featured in the August 1988 issue. The idea was that you could The cartoon used as the lead-in for the Remote Alert/Doorbell project from the August 1988 issue of Silicon Chip (siliconchip. au/Article/7684). Australia's electronics magazine August 2022  39 This shows part of the mezzanine area of our first commercial premises. Greg Swain is in the foreground while our draftsman Bob Flynn is beavering away on his drafting board on a circuit diagram. All the circuits were hand-drawn. A computer and CAD software would come later. press the button on a keyring transmitter to attract attention. The project was a pretty good idea, but the real genius was in the pair of cartoons produced by Brendan Akhurst and reproduced in these pages. I should state here that the cartoons bore no resemblance to the persons depicted therein. Of course, mobile phones have utterly superseded the need for that project. That process would occur many times in the following years, whereby a useful magazine project would be made obsolete by the advance of electronic technology. Leaving the family home Ultimately, the time came to move our magazine operation out from the basement of the Simpson family home. After a few years, we had more staff, and I was fed up with working out of a cramped basement and the fact that it all impinged on the daily life of my wife and our three young daughters. I will never know how my wife coped with all the daily stress, but I am eternally grateful that she had faith in me. So in May 1990, we moved into a capacious industrial unit in Warriewood, also on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. I had vertical blinds and carpet installed, but apart from that, there 40  Silicon Chip were no creature comforts. It was cold in winter and hot in summer, but I had negotiated a very good rental agreement for the first year! By this time, we had more staff, more desks, filing cabinets, the start of a very good technical reference library, more test equipment and so on. We needed that space. It was also during that time that Ann Jenkinson (née Morris) joined the staff to provide all the secretarial duties. Among our many valued and loyal staff, Ann was crucially important to the whole team, eventually becoming office manager. She stayed with us right up to her retirement in March 2021. Desktop publishing During this first year in Warriewood, I wanted to streamline our editorial operations. I looked seriously at purchasing a large bromide camera; second-­hand, of course. But I quickly discarded that idea when we got some desktop publishing software. At that time, Quark Express was the standard for desktop publishing, but all its proponents were using Apple computers. You could also get Aldus Pagemaker for both Apple and IBM PCs, although PCs were disparaged by the cognoscenti. We disregarded all that; besides, we could not afford high-priced Apple Australia's electronics magazine computers and Quark Express, or rather, I refused to spend that much money. Eventually, we found a typesetter in Dee Why who agreed to work with Pagemaker files produced on (ahem, gag, splutter) a PC clone. But it all eventually worked! Our starting hardware for this comprised: 1. A PC-compatible computer with an Intel 386 processor, 120MB hard drive and 4MB RAM. 2. A 300DPI Postscript-compatible laser printer (probably a Hewlett-­ Packard). 3. A Radius 21-inch high-resolution monochrome monitor. 4. A 14.4kb/s modem (the good old dial-up days; a big jump from the 300 baud modem we had when the magazine first started). The software was: 1. Windows 3.1 (an unstable beast that required frequent reboots). 2. Aldus Pagemaker 3 for page layouts. 3. CorelDraw (for special type effects, to create fancy headings and to produce front panels). We used Pagemaker to make up the pages with spaces left for the B&W photos and diagrams (the latter were still hand-drawn). Once the Pagemaker layout was complete, it was printed siliconchip.com.au out and proofread. Pagemaker was then used to produce Postscript files, which were then sent via our modem to the typesetting house in Dee Why to produce a bromide of each page. These page bromides, the photos and the diagrams were couriered in batches to the compositor for final make-up. The photos and diagrams were photographed in a darkroom to produce correct-size images (halftones in the case of the photos), and these were then fed to a waxing machine that applied a wax backing. A compositor then trimmed the edges of each image and carefully stuck it in place on its designated page. The assembled pages were then photostatted and couriered back for final proofreading. The whole procedure was still labour-intensive, but the on-screen layout process saved a considerable amount of money. And there were other big advantages: 1. We could make corrections or additions on the spot after initial proofreading. 2. We could run a spell check over the made-up page before it went to the compositor. 3. It was easy to use special symbols like “W” and “µ” for the resistor and capacitor values. As far as I know, Silicon Chip was one of the first magazines to use desktop publishing on a PC clone. It worked well, and it was a significant achievement for our first year in our first proper premises. Temper tantrums I should mention our adventures with another printer used in our office. This was a large tractor-feed dot-­matrix machine that could be used to produce several different fonts. We used it for general correspondence, monthly invoices, pay slips and to produce the carrier sheets for the subscription copies. It was controlled via a small LCD panel and was quite frustrating to use, to the point where I sometimes felt like picking it up and hurling it off the mezzanine floor of the premises. Suffice to say that the cost of replacing that expensive machine stayed my hand, but only just. Quite a few years later, I had similar frustrations with a much cheaper and smaller dot matrix printer. Remembering the utter frustrations of those earlier times, temptation siliconchip.com.au These two shots show views of our lab set up which was quite spacious. By this stage (mid 1990) we had proper workbenches and gas-lift chairs and quite an array of test equipment, some of it secondhand. ultimately got better of me, and I threw it down the stairs at home – it smashed into smithereens. Sweeping up all the broken plastic cogs, bits and pieces in the aftermath gave me much satisfaction, knowing that I wouldn’t have to put up with it any longer. Yes, yes, I know I shouldn’t have done it, mea culpa, mea culpa etc etc. Editor: later there was a similar scene on a smaller scale when I received an extended call from a rude person on my corded desk phone. The phone somehow took to the air, flew Australia's electronics magazine across the room and came to an abrupt halt in a shower of parts. I put those parts back together, but the phone never quite worked the same after that. At least I didn’t have to deal with that bloke any more! That arrangement in the Warriewood industrial unit lasted slightly less than 12 months because most of the units in this complex of 36 were unsold, and the developer ran into problems with a Victorian bank (some readers may remember the Victorian banking crisis in 1991). August 2022  41 attach a front panel to a finished project if it had been photographed without a front panel in place. Call it skullduggery, but it made the projects look far more professional and also meant that the production panels looked far superior to our previous versions. CAD for PCB design This shot shows the ground floor of our first commercial premises, showing where Ann Morris used to sit, and where we processed subscriptions and mail orders. Leo Simpson lurked in the corner, behind the filing cabinets. The mezzanine floor above would have been the likely launching point for a large printer which caused a huge amount of frustration. The water board advised us that the water would be cut off in a few weeks because of unpaid rates. We had to break the lease and get out. Panic stations! Then, in short order, I had the very good fortune to lease a large office which had been previously used as part of the manufacturing plant for one of Australia’s leading boat builders, at Bassett Street, Mona Vale. After our previous spartan lodgings, this was very spacious and luxurious. The original office fit-out was still in place, with carpeted floors, glass partitioned offices, air-conditioning, a tea room and an attached small warehouse. What bliss. In fact, those premises were to set the standard for all the premises we leased or purchased in the future. We were always able to make use of an existing office fit-out with air conditioning and thereby save a heap of money. I was always conscious of keeping control of expenses. enhance our photos by using various tools to adjust the sharpness, brightness, contrast and shadows. It also allowed us to quickly deep-etch images (ie, remove the background from around an object), a previously labour-intensive task at the compositor. And it allowed us to produce drop shadows for any deep-etched object. Another advantage of Photoshop was that we could directly import and Another big step was to move to on-screen design for PCBs. This was done using Protel (from the company now known as Altium), and we had switched over to this method by June 1992. The parts overlay and wiring diagrams were still done by hand, however. Every year or so, there would be a new version of Protel with more features which we jumped on as soon as they became available. Altium continues that process today and Silicon Chip still uses this world-class software. Next month The story so far takes us up to the end of 1992. We’ll follow up next month with the remainder of the history of Silicon Chip, from 1993 to the present. That article will include details on the people involved and the technological and methodological changes that improved the magazine production process over those SC 30 years. More on magazine production We added an HP flat-bed scanner to our desktop equipment in 1992, shortly after moving to Bassett St, Mona Vale. That enabled us to scan and place the photos directly into our Pagemaker layouts, again saving time and money. We also invested in Adobe Photoshop. This enabled us to greatly 42  Silicon Chip Leo Simpson looks happy sitting in his office at the first rented premises for Silicon Chip, at Warriewood, on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. Unfortunately, we soon had to move from that building as the owner/developer of the complex ran into financial difficulties. Australia's electronics magazine siliconchip.com.au