Give your front door that “ding-dong” appeal of yesteryear!

In the good old days, when computers were huge monsters that lived on the air conditioned top floors of banks and insurance company headquarters and PICs were used with shovels on building sites to dig holes, life was so much simpler.

Nobody in their right mind would want to use either of these to announce the arrival of a visitor to their door and instead a far simpler solution was found – the door chime, which had the added advantage of not playing the Wedding March for twenty minutes each time a double glazing salesman came to call.

Luckily, these did not exist either and only the familiar “ding-dong” sound of the lady selling cosmetics disturbed the peace and tranquility of the family as they huddled around their warm valve wireless set listening to the Home Service instead of arguing about which of the hundred and fifty odd channels to watch or record on their top of the range digital satellite TV/DVD recorder . . . Ah, those were the days . . . now even nostalgia isn’t what it used to be!

To try to return to those simpler times, the author decided to build a door chime that would recreate the sound of the original with electronics (well some things have to move on) but without recourse to microcontrollers, ROMs or special, hard-to-obtain integrated circuits.