This has been a real change in my lifetime. I’m old. I remember when you had to take the tubes out of your television set every so often, take them down to a shop with a tube tester, find and buy replacements for the burned out ones, then put all the tubes, new and old, back into your television just so you could enjoy the vast wasteland. I remember tweaking carburetors as the seasons changed so the engine would idle properly in the summer and in the winter. It was a whole different world of cranky appliances and finicky machines.
To be honest, I don’t miss any of that. On the plus side, I’ve been tinkering with various Arduino scale processors controlling LEDs, sensors, EL wires, relays and the like, and find it amazing. When I was young, I longed to be able to build complex electronic gadgets. I had a cousin who built his own television set from scratch, but every little thing i tried to build seemed to be made of wheels within wheels, so building anything useful was ridiculously complicated and required an incredible amount of work and more money than I could spare to do right.
Now, I can put together all sorts of gizmos by combining little cards or boxes containing high level functional units. Is the boiling sugar water near softball? Just hook up a thermocouple, a thermocouple adapter and read the temperature. There’s no multi-transistor circuit to design, build, and calibrate. Want to control a light panel, just write a little program to pick the colors and send them down the control wire. There are no filters to hack, resistances to calculate or mare’s nest of wires. It is wonderful being able to work with high level components.
Even the iPhone fits in this category. There is almost always an application that does what I want. Sometimes I have to play thesaurus and go a page or two down in the app store, but for a dollar or two, I’m set. A dollar or two was the cost of playing a song or two on the jukebox at the diner, except now the gadget in my pocket can scan documents or flash pretty colors or track my stock trading. It’s like a Swiss army knife with a portable, discount blade store. I can’t understand why anyone feels limited.
