5 ms·

The amount of hidden engineering in Analog systems is mind blowing. Imagine how many hours were spent in a lab figuring out the exact right timings, chemical mi

• nmilo 4y ago
  Sometimes it makes me sad how "boring" digital transmission is. Just pack up your data and send it over IP. Life is too easy.
  • lupire 4y ago
    There are plenty of difficulties hiding in the OSI stack. MTU is a fun one.
    • garaetjjte 4y ago
      OSI stack is dead, TCP/IP won.
      • katbyte 4y ago
        Tcp/ip is only 1 layer (transport) of the osi stack..
        • mvhvv 4y ago
          You made me stop and question myself for a second, but this definitely isn't right. Usually when people talk about "TCP/IP" it's shorthand for the whole "Internet Protocol Suite", but even naively TCP and IP are two different layers.
          • qwery 4y ago
            Yep, the slash is meaningful. I think of writing "TCP/IP" that way as in a fraction -- "TCP over IP" or "TCP on IP". At least, that was how my brain learned it.
        • duskwuff 4y ago
          TCP and IP exist as part of the Internet stack. The OSI stack consisted of an alternate set of standards (like LAPB and X.400) which were not widely adopted. Even if you map Internet protocols to the OSI model -- which is imprecise at best -- TCP represents the transport layer, and IP the network layer. They're not a single component.
      • bonzini 4y ago
        Usually the protocol stack is PHY/MAC/IP/TCP/TLS/application which is 6 layers. It's the same as the OSI stack except for the lack of a session layer, which is somewhat split between TCP 3-way handshake and TLS authentication/authorization.
  • wyager 4y ago
    There are still a ton of complications for digital video. Compression, color spaces, transfer functions, etc.
  • samfisher83 4y ago
    The digital data in many cases is still transformed into sine waves before being transmitted and received. There is a bunch of rf involved.
  • humanistbot 4y ago
    Except now we have to deal with codecs, DRM, color space, and not knowing if your cable meets the spec. Definitely not easy.
  • Gigachad 4y ago
    Only because you are sitting on top of a million prebuilt tools and products. Essentially the same as someone who just purchased the hardware and plugged a video feed in from the camera.
  • bpye 4y ago
    10G-BaseT is pretty complicated though, getting 10Gbps over copper takes some pretty involved signal processing. We’ve just moved it.
  • xani_ 4y ago
    Don't worry, various encoding format, containers and other crap got you covered on complexity. Hell, just look at ffmpeg commandline if you miss some complexity in your life
• JKCalhoun 4y ago
  Yeah, I read stuff like this and think the engineers back in the 50's were some of the smartest. I certainly would not have been able to cut the muster back then.
  • Quarrel 4y ago
    Certainly I think we should ignore the trope that we've left that analog crap behind up and realise that those are just some of the giants whose shoulders we stand upon. Every generation has its challenges, but we can be greatful that the generation before us gave us new ones. It has not always been the case.
    • cameronh90 4y ago
      It's possible for analogue engineering to be incredibly challenging impressive and, to put it crassly, a bit crap. I certainly don't miss the days of adjusting tint settings, headroom, over-scan and interlacing. Digital isn't without its issues of course, but even a lot of those trace their history back to analogue hacks - article case in point. There is this side effect of digital lowering the bar though. Back in the analogue days, you needed to be a wizard to get anything done, which meant a lot of the people then seemed to care about the details more than they do now. Digital makes everything so easy that anyone can do it, which can go both ways.
      • noasaservice 4y ago
        The difference is that analog is EVERYWHERE. Spinning rust drives store analog magnetics that get error corrected to digital. Same with electron potentials in ram. Same with SSDs. Signals over HDMI are converted to analog to display. Sure, it's nice to deal with crisp neat digital signals... But to get there, you always need to deal with analog.
    • bdbenton 4y ago
      It's often in retrospect as well. It can take time for the impact of certain innovations to unfold, and it often begins with a small group of people. The breadth of human innovation is now so wide that a scientist/engineer from the 1950s simply doesn't have the same scope of problems and areas of study to work on. That's why people like Leonardo da Vinci could exist, the scope of human understanding was much smaller and so their work was much more wide-reaching and foundational. Today, you can dedicate your life's work to some hyper-specific problem in a very specific field. Tomorrow, this work might seem fundamentally primitive or foundational in the way that previous generations are perceived.