5 Nov
2005
5 Nov
'05
9:33 a.m.
Tony Duell wrote:
[...]
The roadmap for that is already present here in Germany, and I think
also in the US. This is IMHO driven by the request to close the
"analogue gap" that still allows to make private copies without
continuous cash flow. The market forces behind this will force us to
throw away all our receivers without any shrug of their shoulders -
besides, if you have to buy new equipment (and maybe even renew
it/upgrade it every year, it will produce incredible revenues. Your
maybe expensive B&O receiver set will become obsolete at a simple click
of someone's fingers. One just has to sell the right trojan horse to the
unwashed masses: "digital" is cool, is new, is great, and will give you
much better sound or videos you ever even imagined in your dreams (there
is some small drawback, but don't take it too serious)....it's
absolutely great, isn't it?
Do you really believe a newbie will be able in the beginning to select
among Lattice, Mach, Altera, Xilinx, etc. programmable circuits where
even the datasheet has to be read twice to understand whether this is a
CPLD, EEPLD, FPLD, FPGA, with NOR/NAND/Antifuse program cells or
external boot PROM, with almost uncomparable figures of the transistor
equivalents, and whatever marketing invents in order to increase market
share and to distiguish the basically same ideas? And then select the
one circuit which has a cheap starter-kit, hopefully open-source tools
for a not worse OS, and finally is not a dead horse that hasn't been
delisted some time ago? Probably now, after MSEE degree and PhD, I would
be able to find out after some time, but I won't expect the 13 year old
boy (who built that TTL scrap computer 30 years ago) to come to a
decision today.
If I were to start now, I'd be not too different from the horde today -
have my playstation or the pee-cee and would edonkey or kazaa MP3 files
as everyone, eventually study for MBA, but surely not EE. It's so bad. :-(
Holger
point
emphasizes on the "digitalization" issue:
in the near future there won't be any analogue AM or FM
transmissions/transmitters any more; even SW band migrates
THis ia a great pity, and actually, given the number of cheap radios
around, I wonder if it will ever happen. I can't believe the public will
accept having to replace doxens of sets.
Unfortunately,
many of the more interesting TTLs are now no longer
easily available (you find lots of octal
drivers and registers, but almost none of ALUs, multifunction chips,
RAMs - even the classical
7490,7491,7492,7493 combo of counters for any purpose is reduced to
7490/7493 - noone
needs to divide by 6 ('92) any more - you don't build digital clocks in
TTL) - you have to seek for
them in specialized mail-order shops. This is no issue for us old farts
who play with such stuff for
long time, but it is another hurdle for starters. A kit with all parts
is much easier to acquire - but then,
Waht somebody needs to do (and it can't be me for obvious reasons) is to
select some CPLDs/FPGAs where the download protocol is documented (that
is, you can progam the chip, given the binary file, without a proprietary
programmer), and use the tools (that's why it can't be me) to make some
useful logic functions -- things like an <n> bit universal shift
register, <n> bit ALU, counters, even JK flip-flops, gates, etc. Make the
binary files available for free download.
Anyone wanting to experiment with logic and not wanting to use the
horrible CAD tools under an even worse OS, can then program up some chips
with the appropriate files and use the resulting devices like the TTL of old.