7 ms·

Technology 40 years ago was so simple, that anyone with basic education in electronics could understand how this or other basic utilities work and when opened u

Technology 40 years ago was so simple, that anyone with basic education in electronics could understand how this or other basic utilities work and when opened up could identify which component does what and if you identified a faulty component you could often easily replace it and thus repair it on your own, and skilled individuals could probably make their own from scratch if they could source all components and didn't care about patents.... Nowadays even the products which didn't evolve much since then are often made very hard to repair + new technologies are increasingly more difficult to understand and state of the art technology in some areas is so complicated that we're literally dependent on one or two companies who can make it for us (3nm chips for example, or web browsers in software).. It will be very interesting to follow how much the complexity will increase in the next 40 years..

jacquesm 3y ago
Indeed. I always figured that even if the cost to manufacture has gone down for any given piece of electronics that cost to society has actually gone up because instead of repairing things (which also provided jobs) they are now discarded far earlier than they would have been in the past. Much earlier in my life I earned some money on the side repairing electronics and while it is of course still technically feasible the number of one-off components in any given device is so high and the documentation and repairability so low that it just isn't worth it. This was not a good development, but it seems we're stuck with it. The one big plus from all this integration is that devices consume far less power than they used to.
- judge2020 3y ago
  It's like cars. Decades ago you might see your local mechanic once a year (if you're lucky) or multiple times a year to fix issues with the car, nowadays there's a good chance a new car will go 100k miles with only wear-and-tear items needing maintenance done.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    But if they break you're in for a world of trouble, and you will in one go end up offsetting a good chunk (or more) of what you saved up to that point. In a way this is the result of designing things to outlast their warranty, once the warranty period is over anything that still works was essentially overdesigned. Fortunately for cars and other high ticket items the secondary market will punish brands that are playing it too loose and too fast but I've seen pricing for for instance headlight or taillight assemblies that make you wonder if there is an error.
    - ecpottinger 3y ago
      My mom's fridge broke exactly one day after the warranty expired. She was crying on the phone, then they said they would honour the repair anyway. That made her happy again.
  - Zach_the_Lizard 3y ago
    Old cars had more maintenance requirements and were far less reliable, but repairs tended to be simpler. For example, you may need to tune your carburetor seasonally. Old points based distributors needed the points adjusted or replaced. Simple tools like a screwdriver and a matchbook can get those two sorted. Fuel injection and electronic ignition eliminated a lot of regular maintenance, but they are harder for the average person to troubleshoot, let alone repair. Gone are the days where a rough idle could be fixed with a screwdriver. But so too are the days where a mountain pass requires that same screwdriver to be pulled out on the way up and the way down to adjust the fuel-air ratio.
    - 13of40 3y ago
      I have a car maintenance manual from very early in the 20th century (1910 or something) and the maintenance schedule it describes would be ludicrous nowadays. It talks about changing the oil and greasing all of the joints every couple hundred miles, for example. At the same time, there are some components that are essentially the same now. Based on the diagrams, it looks like the wheel hubs and bearings would be compatible with the ones on my modern boat trailer.
tester756 3y ago
Comparing state of the art semiconductors to web browsers feels like an insult honestly In my opinion browesr are just huge mess of shitton of technologies that are constantly changing/moving, yet fundamentally it is just about processing some letters, executing some code and drawing colors on the monitor. Nothing novel that we weren't doing before or in other software (OSes, compilers, etc) Meanwhile semico feels to be close to the limits of the physics.
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  " just about processing some letters, executing some code and drawing colors on the monitor" Sure, nothing more. Except that this drawing colors on the monitor is plattform independent and used worldwide for all kinds of sandboxed applications and is the plattform for most commercial transactions and normal communications now. So quite trivial and surely anyone can do it.
  - tester756 3y ago
    Sure I made it sound trivial, but that's in the context of comparison with state of the art semiconductor engineering. Semico. engineering is current "rocket science" of 70s. Cross-platform GUIs aren't novel. Frameworks for this shit probably appear every year and are as messy as existing ones. It's a mess, hard mess, but not novelty, not the edge of science / engineering. The problem is to get people to agree on something. >and is the plattform for most commercial transactions and normal communications now What's so novel about it? SMS or even your Master/Visa cards were doing it for decades IRC, Email too. And of course still: we were using Web browser as platform those things for decades. It's not a bleeding "edge" technology in $currentYear. WebAssembly ecosystem? yet another collection of VMs/Compilers/Intermediate Languages? We were doing it for decades. >sandboxed applications Ok, that's fair point - there's novelty needed. Very often because we try to write technology that's... easy to fuckup? idk - check how huge % of CVEs is related to JIT compiler or because we write it in unsafe languages - check how huge % of CVEs is related to mem. issues. But yea, I agree on security - stuff like postquant crypto and other protections.
    - 3y ago
agumonkey 3y ago
Maybe, maybe, there will be a compression/folding event, that squashes all the useless complexity into simpler artefacts.
- tempaccount420 3y ago
  "useless complexity," spoken like a true software engineer.
rob74 3y ago
Yeah, the beauty of simplicity... but OTOH, you had to dial all those phone numbers by hand, the quality for long distance calls was sometimes so bad that you had trouble understanding anything at all, when the phone rang, you had no idea who was calling (or who had called when you didn't get to the phone in time) etc. Newer technology is orders of magnitude more complicated, but it enables you to transmit not only voice, but also several Mbps of data over the same two thin telephone wires.
amelius 3y ago
Or WiFi. Or the USB protocol.
formerly_proven 3y ago
> Technology 40 years ago was so simple, that anyone with basic education in electronics could understand how this or other basic utilities work and when opened up could identify which component does what and if you identified a faulty component you could often easily replace it and thus repair it on your own, You’ve never seen an ISDN phone then (came only a few years after this one was made)
stavros 3y ago
I have a Siemens phone that's similar to this (I turned it into a mobile phone). When I opened it up, it had a leaflet with the schematics of the entire device inside.
jimbokun 3y ago
You make the case for the GPL very well.

jacquesm 3y ago

Indeed. I always figured that even if the cost to manufacture has gone down for any given piece of electronics that cost to society has actually gone up because instead of repairing things (which also provided jobs) they are now discarded far earlier than they would have been in the past. Much earlier in my life I earned some money on the side repairing electronics and while it is of course still technically feasible the number of one-off components in any given device is so high and the documentation and repairability so low that it just isn't worth it. This was not a good development, but it seems we're stuck with it. The one big plus from all this integration is that devices consume far less power than they used to.

judge2020 3y ago
It's like cars. Decades ago you might see your local mechanic once a year (if you're lucky) or multiple times a year to fix issues with the car, nowadays there's a good chance a new car will go 100k miles with only wear-and-tear items needing maintenance done.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  But if they break you're in for a world of trouble, and you will in one go end up offsetting a good chunk (or more) of what you saved up to that point. In a way this is the result of designing things to outlast their warranty, once the warranty period is over anything that still works was essentially overdesigned. Fortunately for cars and other high ticket items the secondary market will punish brands that are playing it too loose and too fast but I've seen pricing for for instance headlight or taillight assemblies that make you wonder if there is an error.
  - ecpottinger 3y ago
    My mom's fridge broke exactly one day after the warranty expired. She was crying on the phone, then they said they would honour the repair anyway. That made her happy again.
- Zach_the_Lizard 3y ago
  Old cars had more maintenance requirements and were far less reliable, but repairs tended to be simpler. For example, you may need to tune your carburetor seasonally. Old points based distributors needed the points adjusted or replaced. Simple tools like a screwdriver and a matchbook can get those two sorted. Fuel injection and electronic ignition eliminated a lot of regular maintenance, but they are harder for the average person to troubleshoot, let alone repair. Gone are the days where a rough idle could be fixed with a screwdriver. But so too are the days where a mountain pass requires that same screwdriver to be pulled out on the way up and the way down to adjust the fuel-air ratio.
  - 13of40 3y ago
    I have a car maintenance manual from very early in the 20th century (1910 or something) and the maintenance schedule it describes would be ludicrous nowadays. It talks about changing the oil and greasing all of the joints every couple hundred miles, for example. At the same time, there are some components that are essentially the same now. Based on the diagrams, it looks like the wheel hubs and bearings would be compatible with the ones on my modern boat trailer.

tester756 3y ago

Comparing state of the art semiconductors to web browsers feels like an insult honestly In my opinion browesr are just huge mess of shitton of technologies that are constantly changing/moving, yet fundamentally it is just about processing some letters, executing some code and drawing colors on the monitor. Nothing novel that we weren't doing before or in other software (OSes, compilers, etc) Meanwhile semico feels to be close to the limits of the physics.

hutzlibu 3y ago
" just about processing some letters, executing some code and drawing colors on the monitor" Sure, nothing more. Except that this drawing colors on the monitor is plattform independent and used worldwide for all kinds of sandboxed applications and is the plattform for most commercial transactions and normal communications now. So quite trivial and surely anyone can do it.
- tester756 3y ago
  Sure I made it sound trivial, but that's in the context of comparison with state of the art semiconductor engineering. Semico. engineering is current "rocket science" of 70s. Cross-platform GUIs aren't novel. Frameworks for this shit probably appear every year and are as messy as existing ones. It's a mess, hard mess, but not novelty, not the edge of science / engineering. The problem is to get people to agree on something. >and is the plattform for most commercial transactions and normal communications now What's so novel about it? SMS or even your Master/Visa cards were doing it for decades IRC, Email too. And of course still: we were using Web browser as platform those things for decades. It's not a bleeding "edge" technology in $currentYear. WebAssembly ecosystem? yet another collection of VMs/Compilers/Intermediate Languages? We were doing it for decades. >sandboxed applications Ok, that's fair point - there's novelty needed. Very often because we try to write technology that's... easy to fuckup? idk - check how huge % of CVEs is related to JIT compiler or because we write it in unsafe languages - check how huge % of CVEs is related to mem. issues. But yea, I agree on security - stuff like postquant crypto and other protections.
  - 3y ago

agumonkey 3y ago

Maybe, maybe, there will be a compression/folding event, that squashes all the useless complexity into simpler artefacts.

tempaccount420 3y ago
"useless complexity," spoken like a true software engineer.

rob74 3y ago

Yeah, the beauty of simplicity... but OTOH, you had to dial all those phone numbers by hand, the quality for long distance calls was sometimes so bad that you had trouble understanding anything at all, when the phone rang, you had no idea who was calling (or who had called when you didn't get to the phone in time) etc. Newer technology is orders of magnitude more complicated, but it enables you to transmit not only voice, but also several Mbps of data over the same two thin telephone wires.

amelius 3y ago

Or WiFi. Or the USB protocol.

formerly_proven 3y ago

> Technology 40 years ago was so simple, that anyone with basic education in electronics could understand how this or other basic utilities work and when opened up could identify which component does what and if you identified a faulty component you could often easily replace it and thus repair it on your own, You’ve never seen an ISDN phone then (came only a few years after this one was made)

stavros 3y ago

I have a Siemens phone that's similar to this (I turned it into a mobile phone). When I opened it up, it had a leaflet with the schematics of the entire device inside.

jimbokun 3y ago

You make the case for the GPL very well.