[lykr0n]

The amount of hidden engineering in Analog systems is mind blowing. Imagine how many hours were spent in a lab figuring out the exact right timings, chemical mixtures, and circuit design needed to make modern Cinema exist as we know it.

[JKCalhoun]

Yeah, I read stuff like this and think the engineers back in the 50's were some of the smartest. I certainly would not have been able to cut the muster back then.

[wruza]

Numerous examples in early digital era as well, see e.g. fast inverse square root, cga color hacks (also entire demoscene) and endless tricks in software that has been outrunning hardware for a while.

Later these were declared wrong, considered harmful, having bad smell, not passing code review and it all became a boring task of combining lego blocks. Sure these analog guys had insane tricks in their sleeves, but our “collective industry” would probably stigmatize them immediately if met today.

[eru]

Different circumstances call for different trade-offs.

[devmor]

Exactly. Their era called for getting things done no matter how. Our era calls for iterability.

[sokoloff]

Phrase tidbit: it’s “pass muster” or “cut the mustard” that you could or couldn’t do.

[wpietri]

Hey, don't spoil it. I was enjoying the image of him standing alone, pulling out a sword and charging at a battalion of soldiers arrayed on a parade ground.

[nicky0]

Pass the mustard?

[Quarrel]

Certainly I think we should ignore the trope that we've left that analog crap behind up and realise that those are just some of the giants whose shoulders we stand upon.

Every generation has its challenges, but we can be greatful that the generation before us gave us new ones. It has not always been the case.

[cameronh90]

It's possible for analogue engineering to be incredibly challenging impressive and, to put it crassly, a bit crap.

I certainly don't miss the days of adjusting tint settings, headroom, over-scan and interlacing. Digital isn't without its issues of course, but even a lot of those trace their history back to analogue hacks - article case in point.

There is this side effect of digital lowering the bar though. Back in the analogue days, you needed to be a wizard to get anything done, which meant a lot of the people then seemed to care about the details more than they do now. Digital makes everything so easy that anyone can do it, which can go both ways.

[noasaservice]

The difference is that analog is EVERYWHERE.

Spinning rust drives store analog magnetics that get error corrected to digital. Same with electron potentials in ram. Same with SSDs. Signals over HDMI are converted to analog to display.

Sure, it's nice to deal with crisp neat digital signals... But to get there, you always need to deal with analog.

[bdbenton]

It's often in retrospect as well. It can take time for the impact of certain innovations to unfold, and it often begins with a small group of people. The breadth of human innovation is now so wide that a scientist/engineer from the 1950s simply doesn't have the same scope of problems and areas of study to work on.

That's why people like Leonardo da Vinci could exist, the scope of human understanding was much smaller and so their work was much more wide-reaching and foundational. Today, you can dedicate your life's work to some hyper-specific problem in a very specific field. Tomorrow, this work might seem fundamentally primitive or foundational in the way that previous generations are perceived.

[nmilo]

Sometimes it makes me sad how "boring" digital transmission is. Just pack up your data and send it over IP. Life is too easy.

[Gigachad]

Only because you are sitting on top of a million prebuilt tools and products. Essentially the same as someone who just purchased the hardware and plugged a video feed in from the camera.

[samfisher83]

The digital data in many cases is still transformed into sine waves before being transmitted and received. There is a bunch of rf involved.

[lupire]

There are plenty of difficulties hiding in the OSI stack. MTU is a fun one.

[garaetjjte]

OSI stack is dead, TCP/IP won.

[bonzini]

Usually the protocol stack is PHY/MAC/IP/TCP/TLS/application which is 6 layers. It's the same as the OSI stack except for the lack of a session layer, which is somewhat split between TCP 3-way handshake and TLS authentication/authorization.

[katbyte]

Tcp/ip is only 1 layer (transport) of the osi stack..

[duskwuff]

TCP and IP exist as part of the Internet stack. The OSI stack consisted of an alternate set of standards (like LAPB and X.400) which were not widely adopted.

Even if you map Internet protocols to the OSI model -- which is imprecise at best -- TCP represents the transport layer, and IP the network layer. They're not a single component.

[mvhvv]

You made me stop and question myself for a second, but this definitely isn't right. Usually when people talk about "TCP/IP" it's shorthand for the whole "Internet Protocol Suite", but even naively TCP and IP are two different layers.

[qwery]

Yep, the slash is meaningful. I think of writing "TCP/IP" that way as in a fraction -- "TCP over IP" or "TCP on IP". At least, that was how my brain learned it.

[wyager]

There are still a ton of complications for digital video. Compression, color spaces, transfer functions, etc.

[bpye]

10G-BaseT is pretty complicated though, getting 10Gbps over copper takes some pretty involved signal processing.

We’ve just moved it.

[humanistbot]

Except now we have to deal with codecs, DRM, color space, and not knowing if your cable meets the spec. Definitely not easy.

[xani_]

Don't worry, various encoding format, containers and other crap got you covered on complexity.

Hell, just look at ffmpeg commandline if you miss some complexity in your life