Hi all,

At the dawn of digital control of things (late 1970's, early-mid 1980's,
I was an audio repair technician. Before then, cassette decks were a
Rube Goldberg mess of gears, levers, springs, pawls, and who knows what
else, every one of which could bend, break or wear. You haven't lived
til you repaired a 1970's Akai cassette deck. It took an hour to
reassemble, with springs flying all over the place. Back in those days,
you had to press the "stop" button before transitioning between any of
play, fast forward, or reverse, or else you'd screw up your tape.

Then they introduced 4 or 8 bit microprocessor systems to control a few
relays to move heads and turn motors, resulting in a much simpler
system on which pressing buttons in the wrong order did no harm because
the microprocessor listened to your button input and "did the right
thing". Technicians and teachers alike heralded the dawn of processor
driven machinery, because an 8080 plus a couple transistors to pull
solenoids were much more reliable than mechanics that could bend or
relays that invariably went bad.

A transistor had a much longer mean
time to failure than a lever, spring, pulley, belt or relay. What they
didn't say is that the sum of a million transistors had a much shorter
mean time to failure than any lever, spring, pulley, belt or relay.
Today's i9 processors have 4 BILLION transistors. Ugh!

When you buy a car, one of the ways they upsell you is to say that your
car's cockpit computer system will be the first thing to go, and that
will be very costly. Yeah, it's nice that today's cars are made with
enough precision that your engine and transmission can last 200K miles
with proper standard maintenance. But the computer systems, the most
difficult things to diagnose and expensive to replace, will go bad in
30-60K miles.

When we were getting our third in-wall Microwave oven replacement, I
mentioned that I'd like it to last as long as our counter microwave
that we'd bought for $55 in 2004. The tech laughed and said modern
stuff doesn't last like the old appliances. A little further inquiry
laid the fault squarely on the massive computerization. Same with
refrigerators: My wife bought a 1990's fridge second had in the early
00's, and that fridge lasted through three brand new kitchen fridges.
Don't get me started on air conditioners with their $600.00 thermostats
and $500.00 circuit boards with interfaces so daunting that the tech
who comes to your house must phone a specialist. I mean really, all you
need is an analog thermostat with one or two thermocouples, connected
to a couple relays or triacs in the air handler and condenser. But
nooooo!

It's a good thing that smart phones obsolete yearly, because I bet they
wouldn't last much longer than two years. About 4 years ago the last of
the fully mechanical washing machines were phased out. My momma didn't
raise no fool: I bought one before they were gone, and when it breaks,
I'll pay more than its purchase price to get it repaired, and you know
what, if the parts aren't available they can be substituted or whatever.

You know what's really annoying? Most of this digitization isn't even
for essentials: It's for cutesy stuff like interfacing your radio, horn
and alarm system together (so it's hard to troubleshoot any of the
three). On a microwave, much of the digitization is so the human can
push the "pop corn", melt butter, or defrost button instead of just
selecting a heat and time. Useless!

And this BS spills over into computers people use. Much of the software
written today has nothing to do with calculating dollars and cents or
angles, internationalization, security, 3d printing, or even games. How
much software is sacrificed at the alter of "user friendly" where "user
friendly" means automatic boot up to X, transparency, various
components of "pretty", drag and drop that's completely different on
every type of user interface, guessing what the user wants instead of
giving the user a menu, and all sorts of other geegaws. Let's not
forget the million plus line of code systemd, or the resource-sucking
KDE and Gnome.

I was around in the 1980's. I saw perfectly normal people use command
line MS-DOS and WordPerfect with great productivity. I saw secretaries
troubleshoot printer problems. In about 1986 I saw an 8 bit CPM
Osbourne computer that came with a multilevel menu, and I saw
WordPerfect's menu program make everyone's life easy on DOS. Even Win95
came with a great menu system. We could have raised the population's IQ
with menu interfaces and some documentation, but instead we chose
gigantically complexify things in the name of "the ordinary user", and
in the process relegated logical thinkers to decreased productivity.
Why???

Appliances, cars, air conditioning, audio equipment computers. Why?
Here's why...

Follow the money!

SteveT

Steve Litt
Autumn 2022 featured book: Thriving in Tough Times
http://www.troubleshooters.com/bookstore/thrive.htm