Sad day. CIE closed.

The school was founded in 1934. It offered correspondence diplomas in electronics technology and was an early NHSC, later DETC, then DEAC accredited institution. I took a diploma and later their AAS degree and had no difficulty selling them in the marketplace. I don’t know what finally killed the market, whether the declining need for technician level workers or increased competition from community colleges but it really is the end of an era.

 

My take:

(1) Progress. ICs etc. Nothing broken is fixed - yanked and replaced. Or the whole device is junked. Good for manufacturers. Bad for technicians.

(2) Degreeification. Some tech schools - those that taught maintenance, repair etc. found it difficult - or impossible to get on the degree-wagon and navigate the degree craze. And that's exactly what it became. A craze.

 

I think that's probably right. CIE offered really excellent lab experiences at home but that got expensive and as you say component level repair is largely history.

 

What's next? X-ray glasses? The Charles Atlas course? Sea monkeys? It's getting so you can't buy anything from the back of a comic book anymore.

RIP, CIE.

 

Seen the price? It's getting so you can hardly buy a comic book any more. As a kid, I remember 10 cents for regulars, 15 cents for "Classics," when I got here in 1952. In England, we didn't really have comic books at that time. We had comic weeklies, like "Beano" and "Dandy" in tabloid-format. And the famous "Eagle." That one a kid could learn a lot from. I loved the cut-away racing car diagrams... the BRM etc...

About 15 years ago, my eldest grandson (he was 9, I think?) discussed this. He was telling his Dad "No. I'm not reading a comic book. This is a graphic novel."

Me: "Do you know the difference between a comic book and a graphic novel?
Grandson: "Um...no, not exactly. What is it, Grampa?
Me: About $5.

 

You asked for it....you got it....still available for a limited time!

https://www.charlesatlas.com/what_is.html

 

Sad, I earned diploma from CIE long time ago.
Loved their concept and correspondance, DL
classes.
Hard to compete with DL offerings without significant overhaul.
Theory can be learned via Coursera, EDX etc for 50$ toa class

 

Oh. Well, that is really sad...

 

Charles Atlas or CIE? Oh -- both. Indeed. Charles's birth name: Angelo Siciliano. But you knew that, right?

 

Please don't say that, Steve.... he was 80, just like me. And I'm just not ready yet. Oh, I will be, but it's gonna be a while, I think. Actually, Charles Atlas died of a heart attack, which occurred while he was hospitalized for chest pains. In the last two years of his life he had been experiencing these pains after exercising.

When I was a young whippersnapper of 72, I had a lot of those pains. I was lucky. I got them really badly in a stress test, at the hospital. About six doctors examined me on the spot and sent me right upstairs for same-day bypass surgery. No pains since and my cardiologist says not to worry - she's got people in her clinic who are 95. I think if medicine had been like it is now, when Mr. Atlas was hospitalized in 1972, he'd have had a few more years. But that's just my take.

 

Does anyone know that you post on this board? I'd hate for anything to happen to you and not know about it.

 

Yes. You'll not miss the DI party. There'll be a cake for sure.

 

Sad day indeed.

 

Yes, regular tv tropes-visitor here; read the bio of the guy after having read the article! https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CharlesAtlasSuperpower

 

Canadians speak English? I thought they spoke Canadian.

 

Canadians speak everything. Take a bus ride downtown in my city. You'll hear 18 languages on the way. Arabic, Hindi, Tagalog, Spanish, Chinese, Yoruba, Urdu...

50 years ago a Canadian comedian (I think, Don Herron) quipped "Toronto's a bilingual city - Italian and Portuguese." My, how times have changed. From "Backgrounder to Toronto" site:

" Of the 1,286,140 immigrants in Toronto, 55.7 percent were born in Asia, up from 53.5 percent in 2016. The three birth countries with the highest proportion of Toronto immigrants were the Philippines (10.3 percent), China (10.1 percent) and India (7.9 percent)."

I like this.... gives us a cool factor we didn't always have. We need that.

 

And here's the famous pic of young Eric Clapton reading Beano. I have that record (John Mayall's Bluesbreakers). Bought it in the 60s. I was a confirmed Beano reader as a kid in England.
https://www.guitarplayer.com/players/old-mans-blues-or-young-mans-blues-heres-why-eric-claptons-beano-album-remains-essential-listening-for-everybody

Beano is habit-forming. A "gateway" thing. Leads to guitar playing... I know.

 

Two words: "Yidlife Crisis". Season 1.