It is time to start packing up the shop. I’m using black plastic bins to put stuff in, indexed by content so at the new house I can unpack slowly (and in some cases keep stuff in storage). I think I will need ~60 of them based on the current consumption rate.

This process means pulling out old boxes that have been sitting on the shelf for many many years. I found a box with my old lasers, which my friend George Dodworth might find humorous. (and I have to assume that Clay Cowgill has a significant collection of these). They are old Helium-Neon glass tube lasers (633nm) , which when I was in high school was all the rage. [and that pesky swat team incident I had] 😉 I built a couple of power supplies to light up the tubes back then, and it was always fun to experiment with them. I did a few film holograms with them, which was seriously fun stuff that could be done even in a home lab. When I was in college working in the laser holography research lab we had HeNe tube just like these, and built a ring laser gyroscope using one (the sagnac effect). That 15mw one from 1990 was probably over $5k new.

It is amazing to compare that to the last picture of a few more recent Laser diode lasers, one 100mw Green, and one 1W blue.