5 Oct
2007
5 Oct
'07
1:14 p.m.
On 05/10/2007, Bryan Pope <bpope at wordstock.com> wrote:
I know a few dozen characters of Chinese. I also know that I could buy
a Chinese dictionary, but it wouldn't tell me anything! :?)
Ahhh. I'm going the other way. The recent new skills that are relevant
to me are principles of firewalling and TCP/IP security, routing, DNS
setup and so on. I'm also trying to learn about setting up and running
Linux servers built from scratch and a bit of coding in Python. For
me, the relevance of basic electronics is declining, not increasing,
and I am already half way through my life and accelerating!
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
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And thusly were the wise words spake by Liam Proven
Er, hardly, when a modern chip has several tens of millions of gates on it!
I make my meagre crust working on machines of, on average, 2-3GHz of
processing power, 1-2 gig of RAM and about a quarter to a half a
terabyte of RAM. I fear when one of those goes wrong, probing for a
duff transistor will do me little good!
Fascinating. The snag is, I know very little about electronics below
the level of a broad knowledge of TTL, the rudiments of circuits and
gates and so on. I have a bit of theory, no practice. I could not
diagnose a faulty chip or anything; my troubleshooting consists of
All you need to start with is a logic probe. Then for simple logic
chips like AND, OR, NOT you would place the logic probe on the one
or two inputs o see if they are high or low. Then from that you
would know what the output should be. For chips that were a little
more complex you would use the truth table from the datasheet for
the particular chip to see what the output should be for each
combination of input(s). Well, aside
from 1 old Sun (SPARCstation IPX), the soon-to-arrive
VAXstation, an Amiga and 2 STs and a QL, all my kit is Macs and PCs.
The PCs range from a 386 to an Athlon XP, Macs from an SE/30 to a Blue
& White G3/400MHz. So I don't run what most people here would consider
"old hardware", I suppose!
I know for the Amiga Commodore provided schematics... I am, a bit like Chuck, mainly a software person,
but one who's
competent with hardware to a basic level. I know bugger-all about
electronics and while I regret that, I'm not inclined to fix it now. I
just have an aesthetic appreciation for the way things /used/ to be
done.
I am also mainly a software person, but I am slowly teaching myself
electronics because I would like to know how the "other side" works! :)