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by Quarrel 1352 days ago
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.
2 comments
cameronh90 1352 days ago
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.

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noasaservice 1352 days ago
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.

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bdbenton 1352 days ago
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.

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