History of OGEE

I originally didn't intend for this page to outline my life's story, but that's kind of what it ended up as (at least from one angle). Well, for what it's worth:

 My background in Electronics

My interest in electronics has always been closely coupled to my interest in music. I took the electronics class in high school, and my first real projects were building simple effects boxes for my guitar (I played in a rock-n-roll band) from Craig Anderton's Electronics Projects for Musicians.
After high school I attended U.C. Berkeley in 1973. I didn't know whether I wanted to be a music major or an electronics major, so I took all the music classes I could, plus all the required math and physics courses required for an engineering major. By the middle of my sophomore year, I decided I would probably starve as a musician, so I declared my EE major, with a minor in music. My specific interest was in analog integrated circuit design.
My first real synthesizer module was a linear VCO I built loosely based on a PAIA 4700 design, as a requirement for an Analog Circuits Lab class (got an A+!).
Another event that would have a tremendous impact on my life, and therefore on OGEE's, was becoming a born again Christian during the summer of '74.

 PMI

After graduating from Berkeley in 1978 I went to work as a design engineer for Precision Monolithics, Inc. in Santa Clara, CA. I had access to state of the art test equipment that I could check out and bring home over the weekend, plus lots of high preceision analog IC's. For example, I was a co-designer on the OP-27, a low noise, high speed, high precision opamp. I used these instead of 741's.
Around that time I was introduced to Bernie Hutchin's Electronotes newsletter. I subscribed, and purchased the Electronic Musical Engineer's Handbook, and a couple of back volumes and application notes.
Also around that time Curtis Electromusic Specialties (CES or CEM), and Solid State Music (SSM) came out with single chip VCO's, VCF's, VCA's, and ADSR's. With these, it was possible to construct high quality synthesizer modules with a fraction of the parts count.

So OGEE was born, and began to grow.

I spent about $600 and 100's of hours designing and building OGEE (my wife was a DIY-synth widow). After about three years I had something that looked and sounded great, that I had built with my own hands from scratch.

 Switching from Electronics to Programming

I mentioned that becoming a Christian had an effect on OGEE. My wife and I both felt a call to the ministry, and in 1981 decided to go to Bible school. I didn't want to leave in the middle of a project I was working on at PMI, so we left the following year in the summer of '82 for Tulsa, Oklahoma (I gave a 6 month notice!).
OGEE was packed in the back of a U-Haul, and ended up in a corner of the garage in Oklahoma. Unfortunately, due to some bad construction techniques, OGEE broke a number of wires during the cross country jostling in the U-Haul, and since I had no access to any test equipment, stayed in the garage.
Since we had to eat and pay the rent, I needed a job in Oklahoma. I had no luck finding a job in electronics (I mean, I didn't know how to fix TV's or stereos - I was an IC designer! People used to wonder how I could have a degree in electronics and not know how to fix their TV). The nearest chip manufacturers were in Texas. So almost on a whim, I went for an interview at a small software shop1 even though my programming experience was limited to Fortran on a huge dinosaur in the basement of Evans Hall in Berkeley, and my TI-58 calculator. But I knew enough to think like a programmer.
I ended up getting the job. The owner liked hiring students from the Bible school, and I was to replace one that had graduated and was moving back to Texas. I also became really good at programming, and found I really liked it. But with going to Bible school, and working 50 hours a week, I didn't have much time for anything else, so OGEE remained neglected.
We returned to California East Bay in 1984. I did a stint as an instructor at a vocational electronics school from 1985-1988, but other than that, I was firmly into computer programming. OGEE stayed in the garage. I ended up selling off some of the electronics parts and junk I had accumulated at a garage sale, because I hadn't touched it in ten years. I junked my keyboard because it had gotten all busted up. I really didn't think I would get back into electronics again because I couldn't afford the equipment I felt I needed, I was busy with other things, and I had the "programming bug" real bad. But I didn't want to get rid of OGEE because I had put so much of myself into it. So it sat in the garage for years.
Even though I couldn't do DIY synthesizer stuff, I was still very interested in electronic music. We bought a Kurzweil EG-20 keyboard, a EMU Proteus I voice module, and a Roland MP-50 sequencer. I also had an AWE32 in my computer, Cakewalk Home Studio, and a cheap midi keyboard controller I could plug directly into my AWE32.

 Back to Electronics as a Hobby

Something interesting happened late 1997 to early 1998 - my interest in programming as a hobby and not just a career started to wane, and I started to want seriously to play the electric guitar again (I had sold my goldtop Les Paul way back in '79 after my band split up). I had been playing the acoustic all along in our church services. Problem is, I didn't think I could just go out and buy a decent electric guitar. I've got a family of 7 and a lot of expenses, and most of the "extra" money we had kept going into computer equipment. But I started drooling over guitar catalogs.
We received a bigger than usual tax refund that year, and I made a bit of extra money doing some outside computer work, so I was able to pick up an inexpensive electric (an Epiphone Les Paul Special II) - actually it's surprising how well it sounds and plays seeing what I paid for it. Of course with an electric guitar, you've got to have effects - gee, wouldn't it be nice to build some? I started coming the net for schematics. I started looking at the synth pages too. Boy, it would be great to get OGEE running again.
So just as my interest in the electric guitar had led me into electronics in high school, it was leading me back into electronics again. My greatest hindrance had always was obtaining what I considered an essential piece of test equipment - an oscilloscope.
Internet to the rescue again! I found this online person to person auction site, ebay (highly recommended!), that always seemed to have two or three used 'scopes offered under the "Miscellaneous, Consumer Electronics" section. I took me a month to win an auction for the budget I had, but I ended up with a used B&K 35MHz dual channel scope for $150 that I'm very happy with.

 Diagnosing OGEE

I finally got around to pulling OGEE up out from under the workbench where I was storing it, dusted off the front panels, which looked just as pretty as when I made them, and turned the cabinets around to look in the back, to begin to assess the broken wire damage. To my horror, I found that at some time or another, mice had been living inside of OGEE! They had left their "presents" everywhere. The circuitry that was low enough for the critters to climb on was badly corroded (power supplies and a couple modules).
I was thoroughly disgusted with myself for the negligence that had allowed this to happen. A tip for you DIY'ers - if your "lab" is in the garage, seal up the back of your cabinets!

That brings things up to date, so on to the reconstruction page.

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