Discrete Components
This is the innards of my TI SR-50. It demonstrates how far we've come in 36 years of electronic evolution. Today's circuit boards have very few "discrete components" on them, and the ones that are mounted to the board are much much smaller than these gigantic dinosaur bones. If you've ever fiddled with hobbyist electronics, you know what you're looking at here... resistors, capacitors, transistors, inductors, a PC board, a couple of Integrated Circuit packages... it was quite sophisticated for the time, but the computer that runs your car now has thousands of times more computational power than this thing does... and those computers are idiots compared to an off-the-shelf PC you would get at Best Buy. But it was super-advanced for the time. It would have been plenty enough to get the Apollo 13 astronauts home safely. As was, sliderules did the job, but not without some worry that maybe an engineer had positioned his slide incorrectly, each time he'd done the calculation, and this the quintuple-check was still wrong and the capsule would hit the atmosphere too steeply and having returned all the way from the moon, burned up 50 miles from safety. Oh for one of these calculators just a few years earlier. But oh well, the astronauts got home alright anyway, and we went on to create ever more powerful computing machines, only to have one of our Mars landers make it all the way to the Red planet just to burn up in the atmosphere because some programmer somewhere had thought the number he was working on was in feet, and it was entered in meters. Fortunately, that lander didn't have people aboard.
Well, that's enough of a ramble on the guts of my old calculator. I think boards like this, where the components are just sitting there, plain for all to see, are beautiful things. The new boards, motherboards for our modern computers and such, are marvels of electrical engineering, but they're not colorful, not engaging, not nitty-gritty sexy like these were. We'll not see them again, but they were, in their time, the very best we could do.
Discrete Components
This is the innards of my TI SR-50. It demonstrates how far we've come in 36 years of electronic evolution. Today's circuit boards have very few "discrete components" on them, and the ones that are mounted to the board are much much smaller than these gigantic dinosaur bones. If you've ever fiddled with hobbyist electronics, you know what you're looking at here... resistors, capacitors, transistors, inductors, a PC board, a couple of Integrated Circuit packages... it was quite sophisticated for the time, but the computer that runs your car now has thousands of times more computational power than this thing does... and those computers are idiots compared to an off-the-shelf PC you would get at Best Buy. But it was super-advanced for the time. It would have been plenty enough to get the Apollo 13 astronauts home safely. As was, sliderules did the job, but not without some worry that maybe an engineer had positioned his slide incorrectly, each time he'd done the calculation, and this the quintuple-check was still wrong and the capsule would hit the atmosphere too steeply and having returned all the way from the moon, burned up 50 miles from safety. Oh for one of these calculators just a few years earlier. But oh well, the astronauts got home alright anyway, and we went on to create ever more powerful computing machines, only to have one of our Mars landers make it all the way to the Red planet just to burn up in the atmosphere because some programmer somewhere had thought the number he was working on was in feet, and it was entered in meters. Fortunately, that lander didn't have people aboard.
Well, that's enough of a ramble on the guts of my old calculator. I think boards like this, where the components are just sitting there, plain for all to see, are beautiful things. The new boards, motherboards for our modern computers and such, are marvels of electrical engineering, but they're not colorful, not engaging, not nitty-gritty sexy like these were. We'll not see them again, but they were, in their time, the very best we could do.