--- import Layout from '@/layouts/Layout.astro'; import FilterableBookGrid from '@/components/FilterableBookGrid'; import { getCollection } from 'astro:content'; import { serializeBook } from '@/lib/types'; const allBooks = await getCollection('books'); const mimsBooks = allBooks .filter(book => book.data.collection === 'mims') .sort((a, b) => a.data.sortOrder - b.data.sortOrder); // Get unique topics for filtering const allTopics = [...new Set(mimsBooks.flatMap(book => book.data.topics))].sort(); const serializedBooks = mimsBooks.map(serializeBook); ---
Home Mims Collection

Forrest Mims Mini-Notebooks

The complete Radio Shack Engineer's Mini-Notebook series. Hand-illustrated electronics education that taught a generation of engineers and hobbyists.

{mimsBooks.length} notebooks
Forrest M. Mims III with his atmospheric measurement instruments at Geronimo Creek Observatory, Texas, 2016
Mims at Geronimo Creek Observatory, 2016. Photo by Minnie C. Mims, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

About Forrest M. Mims III

Forrest M. Mims III is a Texas A&M University graduate, amateur scientist, inventor, and one of the most widely read electronics authors in American history. His Radio Shack Engineer's Mini-Notebook series — featuring hand-lettered text and meticulously drawn circuit diagrams — sold over 7.5 million copies and introduced an entire generation to practical electronics.

Beyond the notebooks, Mims designed atmospheric science instruments used by NASA and has published in Nature, Science, and numerous other journals. He has conducted daily atmospheric measurements at his Geronimo Creek Observatory in Texas since 1990 — a continuous record spanning over three decades. Discover magazine named him one of the "50 Best Brains in Science" in 2008.

Forrest Mims preparing a model rocket for launch near Saigon, Vietnam, 1967
Preparing a model rocket near Saigon, 1967. US Air Force photo, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Forrest Mims with a 1970 model rocket equipped with the first MITS TX-1 telemetry transmitter
With the first MITS TX-1 telemetry transmitter, 1970. Photo by Mark Langford, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

"Run, Forrest, Run!"

"Run, Forrest, Run!" — Forrest Gump (1994), Paramount Pictures. Clip via Movieclips/YouTube.

There's a reason that scene hits so hard. As an infant, I wore old-school foot braces — a pair of rigid shoes bolted to a metal bar that kept my legs aligned. I still get phantom sensations of not being able to move my legs independently, decades later. Dreams where I'm trying to run but something invisible holds my feet together.

Forrest Mims' notebooks were my version of Jenny yelling "Run!" His hand-drawn circuits didn't care about your background or your limitations. They just said: here's how a transistor works, here's how to build something real. That directness — no gatekeeping, no prerequisites, just knowledge laid bare on the page — made electronics feel like something I could actually do. Not just read about. Do.

Learning from Mims felt like the moment the braces broke off. Suddenly the thing that seemed impossibly complicated was just... circuits. Components. Connections you could trace with your finger. And once you built your first blinking LED or heard your first 555 timer squeal, there was no going back. You were running.

About This Collection

These notebooks were originally published by Radio Shack between 1985 and 1993. All materials have been preserved and made available through Archive.org's Folkscanomy project. Click any notebook to view it with our embedded PDF reader, or download it in various formats.