It isn't that the fundamentals themselves become impressive. Rather, we have so much complexity these days, we forget what can be achieved with only a little.

It isn't that the fundamentals themselves become impressive. Rather, we have so much complexity these days, we forget what can be achieved with only a little. I listen to music & radio on my laptop & cell phone, both of which have billions of transistors and thousands of discrete components, compared to the 9? 10? in this circuit. In a sense you could look at this sort of thing as an implied question along the lines of, for all the orders and orders of magnitude of complexity we have now, what has it bought us?