Ask PL: At what point did you realize that you wanted to get involved with laasers?

[edison]

Haha well not sure about that :-). The funny thing with laserlight that it has some kind of sparkle that is damn addictive. If i design for weeks in a row i get less interested in lasers but as soon as i fire one up i,m totally hooked again.

[Fearless]

My foray into lasers came at age 13 when I read CL Strong's Feb 1970 article "A Tunable Laser Using Organic Dye Is Made At Home for Less Than $75" My mother thought I was nuts, but I followed the instructions in the article and made the laser. I even got my mother to drive me to Edmund Scientific in NJ to get mirrors and the diffraction grating. It worked and won me a first place prize at the school's science fair. I loved the Amateur Scientist articles! In a sense, I doing all the stuff I did at age 13--science experiments during the day, and making weird science stuff at night, only it costs WAY more.

[TechJunkie]

Haha well not sure about that :-). The funny thing with laserlight that it has some kind of sparkle that is damn addictive. If i design for weeks in a row i get less interested in lasers but as soon as i fire one up i,m totally hooked again.

I get the photon tingles too.

@Mark. I cant wait to see your stuff at NELEM. I've never seen anything past retail store toy projectors. I may even surprise you with some of my home brew ghetto laser gadgets.

[dzodzo]

The "thinking out of the box" days are over and they are not coming back...

there are some "thinking out of the box" lasershows around these days, that are quite innovative (hint: youtube swamidog)

[absolom7691]

My first experience was when I was 12, seeing Laserium at its original true home, Griffith. Ever since then, I saved up to buy a 1mW HeNe from a mail order in the back of a Pop Sci magazine. Several years later, I discovered MWK and bought a few more lasers and a set of GAL-3 scanners at a Saturday Sale. I built a simple 555 based oscillator for my scanners and I thought that was the coolest thing ever. By then the laser bug had turned cancerous. At 18, I got a job working at MWK and from there, lasers became a big part of my life. I find it amazing that $700 is considered expensive for 1W of green laser light. When I was working at MWK in 1997, 1W of any laser was typically $4500 for a used system and you needed some serious power and water cooling to run it. I don't even want to think about how expensive it must have been back in the 70s and 80s.