The whole understanding of the physics of elementary particles has changed a few times in the last decades. Quantum mechanics and cosmology are other active fields currently. Textbooks and teaching ideas are way behind what students can see for themselves on Horizon programmes, which must be a nightmare for teachers.
Now that's just silly. Both for hardware and software.
I used to design computers, first using TTL then bit slice then micros, the're still the same. Manufacturing has changed, computers haven't, they still work in the same way.
Maybe quantum computers will mean a change in how computers work.
No, all that's changed is that they've got faster and support more memory. The basic architecture is still the same.
You mean apart from the changes in storage media (SSDs), video cards, removable storage (USB), LCD monitors, UEFI booting and GPT partitions,... and for software:
- things have moved on from wading through manuals on assembly.
And software has became bloatware so most of it works no faster than it did 20 years ago on very slow machines.
We were talking about training in up to date technology, as you just illustrated this has changed vastly over the years. The processors are so different you would have trouble in a current design shop. The recent probs with Intel show how little people know about the inner workings these days.
I wouldn't have trouble in a current design shop. I pick things up far faster than almost anyone I have known. Convincing them that someone my age can do the job would be more difficult. Having three days treatment and 11 days compulsory rest every two weeks doesn't leave much time for work anyway.
I think our understanding has changed.
Well, when they were DILs with 0.1 inch pitch I was happy to mod them. These days I can't even see the devices.
Apart from scale, less than you might think. SMT vs through-hole was a jump of course, but since then only the scale has changed much.
Disclaimer: I didn't go in many manufacturing plants between ~1990-2010.
Andy
Very few products are. But computerc science students do have to know about electricity and how th ings do get put togther in the real world that is the point. They need to undersatand the problems bad connections make and such practic al things. I gave one student sandpaper to remove the enamal coating on wire he was us ing to build a speaker and he returned saying the wore just get disapearing he was not only removiong the enamal but continues until he had removed th e copper too. This wire was 38 or 40 SWG so it didn't take much. It;s a goofd idea that they get an idea of what soldering is too.
This weeks practical was to construct a simple flip-flop for counting using sa 74S74N of course they all asked why haven;t I got any 74S74 so I sai d it;s because the academic got it wrong on the lab sheet and it should rea d 74HC74, which he asked me to purchase in an email sent at 7:45pm on the t hursday night before the fridays lab which started at 2pm. How he thought I 'd get 50+ of these chips from farnell in leeds in any weather let aling la st weeks, but he did say don't worry he'd pick some up at Maplin on his way in Friday morning.
That's called kleptomania ;-)
They seem to have half the number you need spread between all their london stores.
Well they arrived today from farnell 12p each we ordered 50, Maplin might have had them but at 49p each.
Another job I did whilst at Ferranti was measuring the performance of "staticisers" (on my first day I just nodded knowledgably until I found out they were talking about flip flops).
If you toggled the D or JK inputs within a few nano-seconds of the clock all sorts of strange things happened to the outputs. I had to test all sorts of fabrication technologies at various temperatures. Low power Schottky, TTL, CMOS, HC, etc.
When I came to plot the results, on log-linear graph paper, I got some very impressive straight lines.
It was all to do with the first generation of automatic ticket reading turnstiles on the London Underground.
P.S.
Getting back onto $Subject, I just made arrangements earlier today to see, for the first time in a long time, a friend of 40 years who originally came from Southend. His mother worked for Maplin, and her picture, along with all the other employees was at the front of early catalogues.
Worse than the organic interface at the end?
Even when I was working full time in assembler that was never an issue. In fact I think I look language things up more often now - C++ is a _lot_ more complex than any assembler.
Andy
+1
Didn't you have difficulty in creating OO structures in assembly? That level of complexity is hidden in modern development languages, which is part of their purpose of course. Things have moved on,and C++is looking a bit ancient. This is progress, a concept denied by the OP in this sub-thread. Stories about experiences in various shops forty years ago refute this view.
The point about assembler and C is that you CAN create effective OO units.
But you are not forced to.
The easiest way is to use the lexical constructs (in C anyway) to isolate OO functionality into one file. I.e use of static global variables and static function names restricts their access to within that file only. The file becomes the 'object'.
C is virtually macro assembler anyway, so there is little point going to pure assembler unless you need hardware access or to do some weird stuff with mode switches etc that are outside the scope of the C language
Actually since OOP code has got worse, slower and more buggy.
Becauses its written by idiots who think they dont need to understand hardware, memory or instruction cycoles.
Bcak in et day peole like you wer touting the merits of Pascal. Today no one uses it, or Modula II.
But C and assembler march on.
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