I am Ricardo Pastor Asensi, a happily married engineer living in my hometown, Alicante, on Spain’s eastern Medierranean coast. I am 66 years old and have four kids.
After having studied electrical engineering at the Technical University of Valencia (Spain), I started working in 1982 at Sociedad Española de Informática S.A. (SECOINSA) as well as being a licensed professional engineer in Alicante. In 1986 I moved to Fujitsu España S.A. and in 1987 I moved to a French multinational company named Intertechnique Informatique (IN2). In 1998 I started my own business of IT and Internet services Tecnograma Consultores S.L. in Alicante.
Mounting and selling tube audio amplifiers was never my goal or when a premeditated plan. I have been an electronic enthusiast for as long as I can remember, even back in those days when the TV receivers were made of ‘modern’ tubes, and so were the radio receivers of our parents also. When I turned 9 years old, my parents gave me a Philips Electronic Engineer Kit, and the transistor appeared in my life. In those early days, and in the days of integrated DIP MSI TTL computing too, electronic devices could be easily assembled and repaired by hand. Nowadays you see a smartphone or computer printed circuit board, and all the passive components such as resistors and capacitors are shrinking to microscopic levels. During my life I have been seeing how the density of components has steadily increased and the space between the pins of the integrated circuits has been decreasing until almost disappearing, to the point where then can’t longer be assembled, measured, or repaired by hand from yourself at home.
And one day I felt like going back to the electronics of the early years, when they could be handled with bare hands. I started reading antique electronic magazines and looking for vintage circuits that could be built in a similar way as it was done before, with the same or electrically similar parts. That’s why I decided to don’t use printed circuits or semiconductors in my creations.
