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I spent my childhood tinkering with electronic circuits, on breadboards, as they used to be called, in particular making radio transmitters.

My first project was to build an ionization gauge control circuit for Professor Edgar Everhart's Cockcroft-Walton accelerator. In those days, vacuum tubes were the active components in electronic circuits. I can still recall the warm orange glow of the vacuum tube filaments and the cool blue glow of the thyratron tubes.

Do you remember those AM radio kits you get as a kid, and you build your own AM radio? Well, I never actually built one. But I did get them as a gift, for, like, 3 Christmases in a row, and I hated them.

I went in, and there, in the front room, a converted bedroom, sat the first radio I had ever seen. The equipment was so bulky that it took up one entire wall of the bedroom. The set, which could send or receive signals, was tuned to KDKA in Pittsburgh, and I remember being completely flabbergasted at the thought of sounds coming from that box.

In 1918, when I was 6 or 7 years old, radio was just coming into use in the Great War.

When I graduated high school, nearly a half-million people subscribed to 'Popular Electronics' magazine. Soldering up some radio or hi-fi amplifier on the basement workbench was not just a personal passion - a lot of young people were doing the same. The magazine expired in 1999 for lack of interest.

I never got a stereo system until about 1969. It was only when I went to America in '68 and listened to FM radio; I really thought, 'Wow, there's something in this.'

My grandfather lived across the garden from us, and in his attic he had a lot of radios, appliances and inventions that he had made over 50 years, such as a keyboard called a clavioline, which can be heard on some Beatles songs - it was popular in the 60s. So we had all that at home.

My mother was a Rockette at Radio City.

I met Leo Fender, who is the guru of all amplifiers, and he gave me a Stratocaster. He became a second father to me.