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To come full circle, hardware today is mostly described by textual descriptions instead of diagrams with boxes and wires exactly because at high enough complexi
by dfox 6y ago
To come full circle, hardware today is mostly described by textual descriptions instead of diagrams with boxes and wires exactly because at high enough complexity the schematics get totally unreadable. And even on the board/component level the schematics for almost any piece of non-trivial hardware made after 1990 consist mostly of boxes with textual net labels.
- jecel 6y agoI don't think it is an issue of complexity since in both text and graphics you can encapsulate parts into a hierarchy of sub-blocks. Having to break things up from a single level into little pieces because of the screen size and letter/A4 paper is the problem. In the 1970s and 1980s I did many projects with huge schematics that you would spread out on large tables and focus on details while seeing the whole thing at the same time. It is an experience that can't be captured at all by a series of small pages, each with one to four boxes and lots of dangling labeled wires going to the other sheets. At that point you might as well just have a textual netlist, which made structural VHDL/Verilog become popular replacements for schematics. Perhaps VR/AR will bring back visual hardware design?