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At one time there were places that had engineers and just plain inventors would could dream up new vacuum tubes in their sleep. Plus come up with factories tha
by fuzzfactor 3y ago
At one time there were places that had engineers and just plain inventors would could dream up new vacuum tubes in their sleep.
Plus come up with factories that could mass-produce the products at commodity prices.
I always thought it was cool to see what happened when people like that got a hold of programmable electronics, especially solid-state.
- 486sx33 3y agoI feel like closing that loop was actually bad for innovation. When we designed analog tubes, there could be some exciting piece to make/invent. Now everything is programmable and we get stuck on “why” or “what” we are trying to make before we even start. A bit like computer software, no one just messes around to make pong or hello world anymore, they are spending 6 months white boarding the thing before they write any code. (Or maybe they aren’t, but in hardware we do) So … nothing super amazing in my sleep anymore. Waking up in the middle of the night to design a circuit to provide a constant -5vdc for a 555 timer while the rest of the circuit is +\- something or another, just doesn’t happen anymore.
- Filligree 3y agoPeople absolutely mess around with software, probably more than ever before. Maybe that doesn’t happen as much with hardware, but I’d be sad if it didn’t happen up here.