OK that's a bit of an exaggeration, but they were pretty big - and so were circuits. We spent many a merry day at college drawing circuits in etch-resistant pens, then dissolving the excess copper in acid baths to produce wild and wonderful electronic circuits (including, for me, an array of delayed lights that looked a lot like the front-up array on K.I.T.T - which I used to strap to the front of my crapped out old Merc).
But what has all this got to do with "SOIC and SOT" - a new STEM-supercharged book from Jeffrey C. Dunnihoo and Simona M Ceccarelli.
Well, the simple answer is that this new series from Jeffrey is designed to get kids as excited about electonics, microchips and circuits as I was back then all those decades ago.
And it's not hard - C already loves tinkering around with her home electronics kit (admittedly at the point to enable her to make as much noise as possible with piezo buzzers) so it was great to find a book that introduced SOIC and SOT, two component buddies who take us on a whistle stop journey along an electronics assembly line.
It's a great way for kids to engage with the subject of electronics and find out what's involved in the entire process end-to-end.
Simona's art is cool, feeling more hand-drawn and cosy than you'd expect from a tale about a pair of electronics components. Yet the story of friendship and curiosity is really quite good - and more books in the series are planned for publication by Pragma media.
If you've got kids at home who would love to build their own flux capacitors (or like C just love tinkering around with switches, buzzers, lamps and batteries) this is a must!
"SOIC and SOT - The Microchips" by Jeffrey C. Dunnihoo and Simona M. Ceccarelli is out now, published by Pragma Media (kindly supplied for review).