The General Approach to Computing - A Ramble

[Johnny Billquist]

Eric J Korpela <korpela at ssl.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 1:04 PM, Warren Wolfe <lists at databasics.us> wrote:
>> > That many
>> > orders of magnitude of complexity have come and gone since the IMSAI days
>> > are good, in terms of what one's money will buy today, but bad in that one
>> > is much less likely to be able to fix one's own equipment to component
>> > level.  It's not as satisfying to say "Hmmm.  You need a new video card" as
>> > to hold up the offending transistor and cackle.   Or is that just me?
> 
> Maybe I'm seeing this from a different angle... I don't see a lot of
> difference besides the complexity of the devices.  A transistor is a
> device that you buy because you can't make one yourself without
> spending way too much money.  A video card is essentially the same
> thing.  You can make one yourself.  Some day we will be forced to in
> order to keep our machines running.  The main difference is that the
> theory of operation of a transistor can be expressed in a 1 page
> document.  The theory of operation of a video card is a small book
> that requires references to other books.

And herein is a big problem. People today don't even know what a 
transistor is.
The difference compared to a video card is huge, but you need to know 
all this to understand that.
Yes, you can build your own transistor. It isn't difficult, and it isn't 
expensive (well, compared to a transistor I guess it might be, but we're 
still talking close to no money). All it requires is two diodes. That's 
all it is, really.
A transistor (and now I'm just talking about bipolar transistors, since 
it's the easiest, and they are very common) is extremely simply to 
understand and build.
But why do that when someone have already done it for you?

The big point, however, is that a transistor is very small, extremely 
cheap, and easily replaceable. A video card have none of those 
attributes, and that's the real point here. You can't "fix" a video 
card. You replace it. Whatever is build with discrete transistors 
however, can be fixed. If the transistor breaks, you replace it.
Fixing a video card is extremely difficult at best, and in the future I 
suspect that will be a lost cause. Fixing whatever item made of discrete 
components will easily be done a 100 years from now, I dare say.

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol