I was on my college fencing team. One summer, I had an internship at HP and they paired me with a grizzled old hardware designer, Fred, as a mentor to build a summer project. Fred had a lab bench with drawers overflowing with old resistors, caps, ICs, and even some tubes (“Fred, what the hell are you going to use those for?” “You never know. Tubes might come back!”). Fred had once accepted a promotion to be a manager and quickly renounced it because he hated it and just wanted to design hardware. I decided to build the electronic scoring system used in fencing matches. Our school had one professional system, but I figured I could replicate it for a lot less money. It was all based on a couple of 555s, some 74-series TTL counters, a few LEDs, buttons, and a speaker. Fred was the guy who showed me how a 555 worked. I built it, it worked, and the school used it for at least a year or two after I left. Happy memories. God bless Fred, wherever he is.