Just amazing! Hardware startups are beyond sexy. There is something so compelling about tactile devices... no amount of sophisticated software engg can come close to that feeling. Wipro's chairman was once asked why wipro still made soap & shampoos even though wipro was a billion dollar software services shop. He just picked up a bar of soap and said - its just very physical. Software, you can't touch, you can't see...

In the early 90s, there was this thing called a centronics port. You looked behind an old dot matrix printer, you found this large ugly parallel port with 25 pins ( http://bit.ly/YT4xRh ). I asked my professor "how does the printer print ? ". He took my question at face value, hooked up the centronics port to a CRT...soon I realized pins 2-9 would output any goddamn digital signal ! Literally anything I wanted. I wrote a quickbasic program to print square wave, sine wave sawtooth... and those waves started showing up on the CRT. So it got me thinking...if I feed that 8 bit output to an 8-bit TI DAC, I can make an analog function generator! ( http://bit.ly/WmFy8o ) My final version needed a 741 op-amp & a 555 timer, but it actually worked over a wide range of frequencies, and was about one hundredth the price of a real Kenwood function generator! Ofcourse, back in those days, there was no YC or startup culture, & that was the end of that device...:( But just thinking about that one hardware device gives me more pleasure than all the software I wrote after graduating.