2026 Analog Aficionados Meetup: Download the Collectible Calendar

Analog gurus

ISSCC dinos

Now friend-zoned experts.

From what Paul Rako and I could piece together so far, analog guru Jim Williams held a party for “analog dinosaurs” back in the day on the Friday after ISSCC at his house. That went on for a couple of years, and then it moved to a fire station for a year or two. Based on some detective work on when ISSCC was and when the calendar fell on a Friday, it can be verified that the following invite from Jim for his dinosaur party was in 1988 (Fig. 1).

Being the third bi-annual puts Jim’s second party in 1987 (a mystery conference that we’re still trying to figure out), and the first get-together likely coincident with ISSCC in 1987.

ISSCC moved its Wed.-Fri. technical session schedule to Mon.-Wed. from 1990 onwards, with Tutorials moving to the prior Sunday, so could that have been the end of the Williams party series? Please comment below if you have firsthand knowledge of any of these past events so that we can reconstruct and preserve this history most accurately. Were there subsequent analog dinosaur gatherings? Anyone know?

Fast-Forwarding a Couple of Decades

Paul Rako, who started Analog Aficionados in 2010, recalls the following years and venues for the Aficionados gathering:

• 2010 and 2011 were held at The Duke of Edinburgh Pub in Cupertino
• 2012 was the first year for David's restaurant. Analog Aficionados is different from the wake for Bob Pease and Jim Williams, which was held on June 21, 2011.
• 2013-2019 David's Restaurant 
• 2020 Pretty sure David's
• 2021 COVID cancelled
• 2022 COVID canceled
• 2023  Jeri Ellsworth's business in Fremont, Tiltfive
• 2024 Pretty sure it was again at Jeri Ellsworth's business in Fremont
• 2025 Stanford Faculty Club, Palo Alto
• 2026 DesignCon at Santa Clara Convention Center

2026 Analog Aficionados

The venue was moved by consensus to coincide with DesignCon 2026 this year and was held from 11 am until 3 pm on Thursday, February 26, at the Convention Center. Most of us had planned to peruse the exhibit floor immediately after breakfast that morning, only to find out its hours were 11 am to 6 pm. So, without further ado, let’s get to some photos and captions from the 2026 Analog Aficionados get-together.

Organizer Tim McCune (Figure 2, pictured with Informa’s Suzanne Deffree) carried Analog Aficionados tradition forward by creating placemats of selected attendees (Figs. 3 and 4), which is an interesting conversation starter for those not fully networked. It’s also a nice keepsake for the event.

Back in 2010, when he founded Analog Aficionados, Paul Rako had a vision of a get-together of analog engineers and select members of the press. Two notorious members of that selected trade press, now retired (Fig. 5), were Paul Rako and Dave Bursky.

Sadly, another of the press greats, Electronic Design’s Don Tuite (along with wife Vicky), could not attend this year due to Don’s struggles with declining health. For the newer generation of engineers who may not be familiar with his work, there’s a free downloadable eBook of selections from Don’s Power and Analog Editor writings on amplifiers for Electronic Design, here.

The big shoes of giants like Bob Pease, Don Tuite, and Paul Rako, among others, are now for me to try to fill as mostly-analog editor at Electronic Design. The very people who inspired me throughout my electronics career, since grade school, preceded me in the same job. Surreal.

Though I took some of the photos at Analog Aficionados (“AA”), some of the gorgeous photos we’re including in a montage of something new we’re trying this year — a calendar that’s available for free download and printing as a poster at print shops and at places like Walgreens and Fedex Office — are mostly credited to Edison Fong (Fig. 6) and Ron Quan (Fig. 7). Both are renowned analog aficionados in their own right. Thanks for permitting us to share the event with our readers, gents.

I usually spend my Decembers through March in sunny, hot places, to get away from the grey skies and rains and sedentary lifestyle that Oregon’s monsoon season has to offer. But I was around this year, so this Aficionados was my first since 2014.

Back then, AA had show-and-tell tables, where attendees brought interesting gadgets to discuss. It was there where I showed everyone my flat LED light bulb prototype. It was basically a complete LED light system condensed to a single circuit board, no heatsinks, which could be machine-assembled and sold for under $10 at a time when LED bulbs were $50.

2014 was also the year that Rako and Fran Hofer got some of the late Bob Pease’s rat’s-nest circuits from his office storage and put them out for all to enjoy. A peek at Paul Rako’s website shows off some of the show-and-tell items from the 2019 AA meeting, as well as naming the cast of characters in attendance. From what I heard, Paul plans to lift all of the AA photos onto his site over the next several months.

This year’s event was four hours of mingling, talking, catching up, and enjoying some great food, as can be seen by the room photos in Figures 8 and 9.

We did, however, catch someone getting some expert consulting on an audio amplifier circuit (Fig. 10).

With the Electronic Design site redesign back in September, we lost the ability to do slideshows, which would have been perfect for browsing the copious number of photos from this year’s AA meetup, trying to get enough put up to where we wouldn’t leave someone out.

With that constraint, I asked our art department to create a collage of a selection of the AA photos in the spirit of a gigapixel-esque image project. Here’s the low-resolution mashup of it as Figure 11.

Get Your 2026 Analog Aficionados Calendar

With the demise of slideshow capability, and with the large number of Analog Aficionados photos of some of the greats in our industry, we’ve created a keepsake 2026 calendar. Electronic Design’s readers can download and print it out as a poster at a local print shop or photo service like the one I’ve used at Walgreens in the past.

The poster has a high-resolution version of Figure 11 and a calendar, making it a useful wall decoration for any lab, den, Zoom background, or lair. If it’s well-received, based on the number of downloads our management sees over coming weeks, we’ll try to make this an annual collectible commemorative.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Suzanne Deffree over at Informa, who is the organizer of the DesignCon show, for providing the room for the AA get-together. Thanks to Tim McCune for carrying on the tradition with organizing the event, herding sponsors, communicating with everyone, putting the placemats together, and for personally covering the financial shortfall of the event (it could use a few more sponsors next year). Thanks to Paul Rako for worrying about the tiny details so the event went smoothly, and for throwing in some of his personal cash to cover the dinner’s costs for those who are unfortunate without an income. And thanks to Ron Quan, Ed Fong, and Paul Rako for sharing their pictures from the event and for putting in time over that weekend so there’s a timely memorialization of Analog Aficionados to share with Electronic Design’s readers.

Tim has also kept a modest Analog Aficionados site going that includes the placemats from most of the prior Aficionados meetings.

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