Electronics Barn closing

On Tue, 3 Aug 2004 02:19:24 +0200 (MEST) "Fred N. van Kempen" <waltje(a)pdp11.nl> wrote: Sadly, I find myself surrounded in professional life by a lot of people who don't do anything dramatic or non-standard at all, but thrive on conforming. They don't play a guitar or kick a football. But they got through school well, and with high marks, by knowing the right answers to give, the proper hoops to leap through to attain approval and high marks, etc. In professional life they are highly rewarded for sitting through meetings politely, knowing how to 'work well on a team' in gantt-chart directed efforts toward developing mediocre products driven by mainstream trends. There isn't room anymore in such circles for generalists, for people who ask 'why' at inappropriate times in the meetings, nor for people who want to understand the whole machine. It's hard as hell to get the total picture, or even a good deep approximation, of how a 'current' PC works, for instance. Going back to my first exposure to computers, on HP Timesharing systems in the mid 70's running BASIC programs, I wanted to know what was 'under the hood.' There was a period, in the 80's when it was almost possible to get all the docs, the era when the IBM Technical Reference manuals had schematics and the complete commented source code for the BIOS chip contents, the era when they printed the schematics right in the manual for the Commodore 64. It used to be able to troubleshoot and repair about any clone 8088-XT motherboard, from the schematic that was included in one of the little manuals that came with MBs then (the days of the TRUE clones, when every Taiwanese motherboard was based on one knockoff copy of the IBM original, down to the part numbers and layout of the TTL chips) Those days are long gone, though. I've got a BUNCH of books and reference materials, i.e. the Mindstorm book series up to the Pentium and the PCI bus, but the tech rolls ever forward, and people look at you funny when you raise questions about punch through abstraction layers like the APIs to talk to a USB device to wrangle the actual bits in question. And it's not really that interesting anymore to know how a PC works. It's such a piled-on design, more fit for study by anthropologists studying the engineering culture of compromise and lowest-common-denominator design than anybody with an appreciation of technical excellence.