When I was a young lad in England in the early 1970s, I used to read a monthly electronics hobbyist magazine called Practical Electronics.
When I say "read" I really mean "devour!" When the time was coming close for a new issue to hit the stands, I would visit the newsagent every day after school pleading "Has it arrived yet?" As soon as the magazine did arrive I read it cover to cover, and then I jumped on a bus to visit my local electronics store to purchase the components required to build one of that month's projects (my favorite series was called "Take Twenty" in which each project had fewer than 20 components and cost less than 20 shillings).
Many of the projects in those days employed 7400-series TTL integrated circuits. This family of components contained hundreds of devices that provided everything from basic logic gates and flip-flops to more sophisticated elements like counters and decoders and even simple Arithmetic Logic Units (ALUs).
This was, to a large extent, how I learned the fundamentals of digital electronics. Also, because this is what I was learning with, it made perfect sense to me that you could have a silicon chip containing four 2-input NAND gates (the 7400) or four 2-input NOR gates (the 7402).
Time passed (as is its wont) and I met older engineers who had grown up creating digital logic circuits using discrete transistors resistors, and capacitors. It amazed me that many of these folks simply couldn't wrap their brains around the use of digital integrated circuits. (And don't even get me started talking about the analog-digital divide.)
Over the years I've come to see this many times. I've met guys who grew up working with vacuum tubes who couldn't make the transition to semiconductors – they found the high-tension supplies associated with the tubes easier to understand than the low-voltage power supplies used by transistors. I've also met folks who understood the use of basic digital chips but who couldn't get to grips with the concept of simple 8bit microprocessors. And there are folks who were experts with 8bit microprocessors and assembly language who find themselves overwhelmed by 32bit and 64bit processors and high-level programming languages.
I must admit that I've started to wonder if this will one day happen to me – is there some new technology on the horizon that will leave me baffled and bewildered...
用户3675879 2011-11-24 17:22
I had the same eagerness to buy those magazines, including elektor etc and remember many of the projects dating back to the early 70's ( and maybe earlier ). Happy days!
用户3647250 2011-11-22 14:00
Hi Clive,
Great! I remember the thrill in '78 when I first connected a 7-segment LED display to 7447 and got numbers changing BCD code on input pins. Texas Instruments's 74xx TTLand National's 40xx CMOS devices were available only in few big cities and Intel's 8085 was not so easily available in India. Vaccume tubes were dominantly used in radios and TVs. Today it will be very hard to get people knowing anything about 'Valves'. You are right, I see lots of old era engineers don't touch micros or logic things at all. But at the same time very large segment of newer electronics engineers are lacking good analog skills. They find programming chips an easy and 'clean' job. This is not a very healthy situation and needs to be improved.