[time-nuts] Help - Hope?

John Miles jmiles at pop.net
Mon Jan 2 16:22:37 EST 2006


Exactly.  That was an unenlightened attitude for the old-timers to have back
then, and it's no smarter now.

-- john, KE5FX

> "John Miles" <jmiles at pop.net> wrote:
> > To the chip designer, a "component" is probably a subcircuit model that
> > exists only in software.  To me, a "component" is the resulting
> chip, with
> > pins you can solder stuff to.  To the kid, the "component" is
> the monolithic
> > WiFi card.  There is little to be gained by assigning relative levels of
> > merit to different abstraction levels, or assuming that society
> is doomed
> > because people rarely work their way down the abstraction
> hierarchy without
> > a compelling need.
>
> When I was a kid, all the oldest hams looked down on us young'uns who
> built transmitters etc. To them, making a radio was to make a spark gap
> transmitter involving wood and metal lathes, varnish, copper wire
> and installing your own cloth insulation.  We didn't know how lucky
> we were, buying resistors and capacitors off the shelf instead of making
> them from scratch :-).
>
> Tim.
>
>





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