24 Apr
2009
24 Apr
'09
9:36 a.m.
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:
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
> 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.