What happens when you send a day-dreamer to electronics school?  Throw in a few too many hours spent reading Pogo Possum in the Sunday Funnies and you have this: 

A quick vastly over-simplified primer for those of you unfamiliar with electronics:

• The heart of electronics is the sophisticated control of the flow of electricity. 
• Electricity flows in waves, pulses, or just plain vanilla straight, like the Okefenokee River, and electronics is the art/science of directing that flow and making it do tricks.  To do this, we build teeny-tiny little switches and call them 'circuits'.
• Electronic waves can come in many varieties, described by their appearance on a video monitor - sine waves are smooth curves; square waves are sine waves flattened on the top and bottom, and saw-tooth waves look like a skate-board ramp.  Each have a purpose.
• 'Square waves' are used to control changes of state - that is, they serve as on/off switches for circuits.  They can also act as counters, references for measurement, and signals to your game-boy to show your score, as well as display your favorite hero pounding the heck out  of the monsters.
• The multi-vibrator is a square-wave generator.  Just another name for a circuit that churns out continuous streams of alternating current.
• The phantastron is a pulse generator, which might be considered a 'one-shot multi-vibrator', since one-half a square wave cycle is a pulse.  To confuse you, it can also turn out one half of a sine wave, or a single saw-tooth wave.  It is a tricky little devil.