Thanks to Bob KD4EBM for sending this.
There is so much good info in this video: They crack open a logic chip and look at the internal construction (it is entirely understandable by mortal minds). They use cool test gear to troubleshoot the clock from a Soyuz spacecraft. They explain very clearly the series and parallel resonances of quartz crystals, then display these resonances on a very nice spectrum analyzer.
The creator of the video is CuriousMarc. He has many other interesting projects:
https://www.youtube.com/c/CuriousMarc/featured
https://www.curiousmarc.com/
His bio is here:
One paragraph from his bio really resonated with me:
Working on this old stuff forces me to deal with the very fundamentals of electronics (and electro-mechanics). The principles are exactly the same as today, but nothing is hidden in mysterious circuits - you can understand and fix everything. Years of Moore's law has sure given us gobs of transistors, oceans of memory and a glut of gigacycles, but many times, particularly in consumer hardware, these are simply used to cover up poor and inefficient designs - and resource devouring software. What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away, as they say. It often irritates me that my PC takes several seconds to react to a simple command, in which time it must have executed billions of unnecessary instructions and consumed a few gigabytes of memory, no one knowing exactly what for anymore. Nothing like this in old high-end hardware: designs are pure and efficient, and the lack of resources is compensated by engineering mastery and immense cleverness, which is a joy to reverse engineer. Not only does it teach us timeless electrical fundamentals and engineering tricks, but it also gives us a much better appreciation of today's tech. How did all the technology we take for granted came to be? It will make you a far better engineer and inventor if you take the time to be a thorough student of the inventions of your illustrious predecessors.
Thanks, Bill. Good to see you back 'on deck' here!
ReplyDeleteThe philosophy applies universally: knowing the fact is only half the story: the rest is How and WHY the fact.