This is with all seriousness the most informative thing I read this week. Took me right back to my abortive flirtation with EE as an undergrad. If thing had been explained this clearly, I might have stuck with it.
This article exhibits the sort of passion that someone needs in order to become "really good" at something.
Maybe 90% or even 99% of designers would only be interested in taking a regulator, connecting input, output and ground, and perhaps some adding bypass caps, and stopping right there. Good enough to make it work in most situations.
But that final 1% are the really good engineers. They want to truly understand or grok what all the components of the circuit are doing. That's what lets them achieve so much more than the typical engineer.
From what I've seen (but I haven't really studied his designs in detail) Steve Wozniak was (is?) the epitome of a great design engineer. His designs were magical for their time. The article also mentions Bob Widlar, who was also truly one of the greats.
Well put. I think you're about 95% right about Woz. The difference is that looking something Widlar or Pease did, I go "holy shit, that's genius! I would never have thought of that!". Some of Woz stuff (I'm looking at you, Apple II disk controller) are just "that's demented. I wouldn't have wanted to think that up. Genius, but demented".
You can't thoroughly appreciate Woz's disk controller until you compare it to the abortion that was the C64's floppy disk system, nor his display circuitry until you compare it to the atrocity that was the IBM CGA adapter. That's when you realize that he wasn't a once-in-100 years fluke of engineering genetics, but the once-in-500 years kind.
The abysmal performance of the C64 floppy disk was due to a bug, but management went ahead and decided to ship it anyway. It was supposed to be 10x faster, thus the 3rd party ROM replacements.
The funny thing was, the same was true of Apple's DOS. With all the engineering talent including Woz's own, it never occurred to anyone there that they should have read the sectors in each track in descending rather than ascending order to save wasted disk rotations.
I'm with you, great article. I managed to finish my EE degree in 2002 from a top university, but it was a slog. I really wish articles like this were more prevalent back then.
Maybe 90% or even 99% of designers would only be interested in taking a regulator, connecting input, output and ground, and perhaps some adding bypass caps, and stopping right there. Good enough to make it work in most situations.
But that final 1% are the really good engineers. They want to truly understand or grok what all the components of the circuit are doing. That's what lets them achieve so much more than the typical engineer.
From what I've seen (but I haven't really studied his designs in detail) Steve Wozniak was (is?) the epitome of a great design engineer. His designs were magical for their time. The article also mentions Bob Widlar, who was also truly one of the greats.