
Design electronics like it is 70s at CERN - rbanffy
https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNjVlcaYM4Fre6F_AGtX6Jw0K1BIylWILAPAXds9WwPalniCJwPFOX5v8h1T-CtoQ?key=OVBmbGlwa2dXUXg1a2JBUnpvYWotNVB6cUdyTkVR
======
dr_dshiv
Von Neumann posthumously patented an analog computing architecture. I don't
think it was ever built.
[https://patents.google.com/patent/US2815488A/en](https://patents.google.com/patent/US2815488A/en)

However, there is a lab at Berkeley working on the topic, with really
interesting work being done:
[http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~tianshi/research.html](http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~tianshi/research.html)

"logic is encoded using the phase of oscillatory signals, rather than voltage
levels. Such phase encoding has long been used in radio communication for its
superior noise immunity; we show that it can also be used for computation,
using self-sustaining nonlinear oscillators as underlying logic elements."

Harmonic injection computing, anyone?

~~~
gaze
Phase encoding for computation is the essential framework for cat-state based
bosonic quantum computation. What’s old is new I guess.

~~~
dr_dshiv
Where can I learn more about this?

------
sleavey
Reminds me a little of the two labs I've worked in in the course of my
gravitational wave interferometry research in the LIGO collaboration. Analog
electronics are still (usually) far faster and far less noisy than digital as
a way to implement feedback loops and frequency modulation/demodulation, and
most of the best op-amps are 70s or 80s designs (e.g. TL074, OP27, LT1028,
etc.). Our labs are full of them, and, they work at least as well as modern
equivalents, so why not keep using them?

~~~
jleahy
The LF411 is nice and a modern design, so there have been incremental
improvements.

~~~
guenthert
The LF411 is more than 30years old and can be understood as an upgrade to the
jellybean 741, but that one is quite shoddy by today's standards. With the
JFET inputs and corresponding low bias current, it comes much closer to the
ideal OpAmp than a 741, but there's little else speaking for it (well, it's
cheap too). LT1028 OTOH is _still_ the OpAmp with the lowest voltage noise
afaik (which it buys with fairly high input currents and input current noise),
it's still available, but it ain't cheap.

There has been progress in other regards (lower supply voltages, lower power
consumption, rail-to-rail operation, smaller packages), but clearly progress
in the analog realm over the last forty years has been much more modest than
in the digital.

------
culturestate
I love looking at old processes like this and seeing how they influence modern
methodologies. The tape out in particular is _really_ interesting, and reminds
me of the old school photo and pasteup techniques[1] that graphic designers
used to use.

It makes me a bit sad that it's getting harder to find places to get hands-on
with these old manual processes, because it's a great way to wrap your head
around the fundamental concepts of the thing you're learning. I'm younger than
the author, but well into the internet age we were still taught manual pasteup
and letterpress on old Heidelberg platen presses in our high school graphic
design courses and I draw on some of that process knowledge even today.

It also feels like those experiences were really helpful for learning to think
systematically and predicting how the consequence of the design decision I
make now will affect me down the line. Today if I screwed up a plate it would
take me a few minutes to fix; back then it would've taken literally _hours_
and, if we were running business, cost a ton of money in lost production time.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paste_up](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paste_up)

~~~
systemvoltage
I love looking at old processes only to think "Boy...we've lost the ability to
make mechanical things well because almost everything (barring servos,
actuators) is now software controlled". In electronics, it is dumbed down to
reading a 870 page datasheet about an all-in-one-mother-of-all-peripherals
SOC. No more discrete circuitry, no more logic chips, none of that.

Note that I am not saying those solutions were better, but there was a lot of
hardwork, talent and intense discipline in making stuff back in the day.
Drawings were _hand_ drawn! Some guy was bending down for 3 days straight to
make that schematic!

It's all too viscerally physical and mechanical. I want a time machine to go
to the 70's for a bit, and furiously document and interview people. Lot of
this knowledge and expertise is lost because we don't need this stuff anymore.

Remember things when they had toggle switches and knobs? What happened? We
have touch screens that ask us to scan the QR code of the water filter before
dispensing water from the Fridge. Oh, but it shows today's weather on the
door. So great.

On Hackernews, we are such an intense bit of people - we should bring some of
the old tech back and _simplify_ our world. If you're in software, build flat,
simple and fast apps that are maintainable. Make them composable and modular.
If you're in hardware, build high quality stuff for twice the price but then
convince the user through honest & truthful marketing that this product is
better for you in the long run. Instead, the rush these days is to market
products with abhorrent psychological tricks and backstab users with all kinds
of dark patterns. Shame on you guys. When you're on your death bed, none of
this will matter. Do good things and build great stuff. Atleast I will reflect
back that I made the users, you know the ones that provided me with a living
wage, happy.

~~~
buzzkillington
>Shame on you guys. When you're on your death bed, none of this will matter.
Do good things and build great stuff. Atleast I will reflect back that I made
the users, you know the ones that provided me with a living wage, happy.

Users are welcome to pay the _real_ price of the product if they don't want it
to be spyware.

At any rate, if you're thinking about work on your deathbed you have more
things to worry about than how happy users are with the junk you made while
living.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> Users are welcome to pay the _real_ price of the product if they don't want
> it to be spyware.

Once upon a time there were many profitable business models for selling
software.

Then software got big. You weren't selling a thousand copies anymore, now it's
a billion.

The economics of software is that the price you "need" to charge goes down
when the number of users goes up. If it costs ten million to develop and you
have a thousand users, they each have to pay at least $10,000. If you have a
million users they only have to pay $10.

If you have a billion users they each only have to pay $0.01.

You can get more than the $0.01 from each user through advertising. What you
can't do is get an amount on that scale through payment processing, because
the transaction overhead is larger than that.

So now you have a user that the advertiser is willing to pay $0.03 to
advertise to. The users themselves are willing to pay $0.05 to not be spied
on, but you haven't got any efficient way to get $0.05 from them. It'd have to
be much more than that to justify the payment processing overhead, and the
user isn't willing to pay _that_ much.

So it's not a matter of the users being unwilling to pay, it's that we don't
have an efficient way for them to pay that small of an amount.

~~~
buzzkillington
The _real_ price of software includes the price of delivery.

Users would rather not pay that, so we are stuck with craptastic spyware that
is selling their data to google, facebook, the NSA, the Chinese communist
party and that organ harvester from Moldova.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _The real price of software includes the price of delivery._

The real price of delivery of software over the Internet is _zero_.

(Well, it's slightly above zero, because all the networking equipment uses
electricity, but you pay for your part of that in your power and Internet
bills.)

~~~
buzzkillington
>The real price of delivery of software over the Internet is zero.

Let me know the name of the apt mirror you're running. I'll be sure to point
the couple hundred machines I admin for their hourly updates.

~~~
TeMPOraL
That's not delivery, that's the storage part of distribution.

~~~
buzzkillington
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loki%27s_Wager](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loki%27s_Wager)

------
markb139
This reminds me of my time spent working as an engineer in BBC television in
the late 80s. There was a lot of kit designed and built by the BBC design
department. It Was just so well designed, built and documented. In the 90’s it
all started to go digital and less fun to maintain

~~~
hazeii
Yes, I remember them building one of the first digital frame stores at
Kingswood Warren, must've been early to mid-80's - huge 14" disk packs with
the electronics to digitise/recreate the analogue broadcast-quality video
signals ("ah, the smell of a burning disk pack in the morning" \- after a head
crash).

Eventually installed at Television Centre, together with our PDP-11 driven
motorised rostrum camera.

------
ZeroCool2u
Wow, these photos are beautiful and I really enjoyed reading through this.
They capture a rich piece of technical history that most people wouldn't
normally get to appreciate.

Also, I didn't understand why Google Photos was in the title at first, but I
actually really like this presentation format. It's kind of like a super clean
blog post.

~~~
retox
The first picture made me think of a milking line for cows, or whatever the
terminology is.

~~~
chrismartin
Parlor!

------
haberman
Can anyone recommend a good intro to analogue circuit design? I've dabbled
enough in digital circuit design to have a rough intuition for how to do
interesting things with logic gates. But I don't have the faintest clue how
even the most basic analogue circuits work, eg. a variable-pitch tone
generator. I have no intuition for how you could build an oscilloscope with a
fully analogue signal chain.

~~~
duck2
First chapters of The Art of Electronics might be a good start.

~~~
m0xte
And the associated learning the art of electronics text. The first edition
student manual was what taught me.

------
sitkack
I miss physics, tech is a crappy replacement for solving hard problems.

~~~
rohan1024
Physics is the problem that nature has thrown at us. Technology problems are
something that we create to solve real problems. Unfortunately, we lost the
real problem solving part somewhere and the biggest technological problem we
have now is how to keep eyeballs throughout the globe glued to your app or
service.

Of course, it will feel crappy in solving that problem.

~~~
WWLink
"the biggest technological problem we have now is how to keep eyeballs
throughout the globe glued to your app or service"

It's funny because there's so many more meaningful problems you can solve as a
programmer. However, most of those jobs pay a little bit less.

~~~
noir_lord
The delta is smaller outside the US though.

I mean it is insane to me on a rational level that an embedded
engineer/programmer working for a company designing avionics software/train
control software in the UK/France or Germany earns less (by half) what someone
in SV does working for some start-ups.

I get the whole "they are paid what the market determines they are worth
thing" but intuitively I find it weird.

If I could do my life over again I'd have gone to Uni and done electronics and
then moved into that kind of field, not for the money - it's about the same
but because it is _interesting_ and you get to point at a train or plane and
say "it's safer because I did my job".

------
blueintegral
And that's where the term "tape out" comes from, and the term is still used to
this day (although mostly just in IC design).

------
daneel_w
"The engineers knew their jobs, not much opportunities to copy/paste blocks
from the interwebs, nor asking in a forum what the problem might be :-)"

~~~
b1c837696ba28b
We had colleagues, photocopiers and telephones. A good lab had a large library
and many shelf-feet of schematics. Search was difficult, sure, but copy pasta
was just as fundamental to a young engineer then as it is now. The
consequences for bad judgement were however a bit smokier (is that why my
memories are hazy?)

~~~
farns
The “trust what worked and copy” mentality and potentially lack of access to
the original designer sometimes can lead young engineers read too much into
the intent of designs and be unwilling to consider changes. Sometimes this
helps keep the “magic smoke” in, and sometimes the original designs truly are
elegant, but other times it can be an impediment to progress. “But this is the
founders’ work! How could we possibly improve on that!” I’ve been in some
design reviews like that. Old designs sometimes become legendary and thus hard
to convince others to change, even when needed.

------
nieve
The Chibitronics kits are great for kids or really anyone who wants to play
with laying out circuits and components by hand. I'm not sure there's anything
else in the space, but they're pretty reasonably priced:
[https://chibitronics.com/lovetocode/](https://chibitronics.com/lovetocode/)

> Chibitronics is an evolution of Jie Qi’s passion for combining technology
> and art through making electronics using paper craft. The circuit stickers
> were developed as part of her PhD research at the MIT Media Lab. Together
> with Andrew “bunnie” Huang and Patricia Ng, Jie’s research has evolved into
> the Chibitronics toolkits.

------
FpUser
> _Now the interesting part. The traces were actually not drawn by an ink.
> They were pieces of opaque adhesive tape_

OMG. I remember doing it.

------
chiph
I never did the sticky-tape and photoresist circuit cards. But Radio Shack
sold some circuit transfer-decals that you pressed onto your cleaned copper
board, prior to dunking it in the etchant solution. The trick was to remember
that the order of the pins was reversed, since you were laying out the
underside.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
I actually started one level lower than that: in high school, those cost too
much, but I discovered that a Sharpie made good, cheap etch resist :-)

Later at my first job, we made our own prototypes in the basement. We had a
giant Agfa stat camera that would take the 2x artwork and reduce it 50% onto
clear film that we would use to expose photosensitive resist coated PCB and
then etch.

I really, really don't miss those days :-)

~~~
Gibbon1
First job the draftsman would layout PCB's with tape and pads on mylar sheets
And then we'd send those out to be reduced. Then to the FAB house who'd run
some prototypes. All told the whole process seemed to take about 3 months from
scratch.

The couple of times I delt with homemade PCB's... janky.

If I had to prototype something I'd buy vector board with plated through holes
and then solder wire wrap wire to sockets. Quicker and almost as reliable as a
professional PCB.

------
myth2018
Thank you so much for posting this.

I have a very strong interest about how folks used to make develop and build
technology back on the time. Sometimes I think we are losing A LOT by not keep
certain design principles in our minds, and that applies to maths, software
development, electronics, engineering in general and many other fields.

I believe that we could get so much more out of our available, modern tools if
we started to pay more attention to the history of our fields.

------
cpcallen
So, I've seen circuit boards with ground planes before, but what I don't quite
understand is: why are the holes that are connected to the ground plane
connected by two small traces (i.e., are surrounded by two C-shaped cut-outs),
instead of just being drilled directly into a solid, uninterrupted ground
plane?

~~~
farns
It is to make the soldering process easier and faster by increasing the
thermal resistance between the pin and the large metal of the gnd plane. If
the gnd pins were sunk into the ground plane directly, the assembler would
have to leave the solder iron in place longer, which would heat up more area,
and possibly cause damage to the nearby parts.

------
nine_k
Just look. Sources in near-perfect order. All build artifacts attached and
stored (including the punch tape for the drilling CNC machine). Evidence in
the form of photos from an oscilloscope screen attached. The results worked
for 40+ years.

 _Huge_ respect to the engineering culture of these people.

------
johnnyAghands
Wow I'm glad this person saw the value and wrote this! I hope it becomes a
series of posts. I'm on the software side, but have always romanticized the
hardware side -- gotta stop wasting time and start learning and tinkering with
hardware...

------
amelius
If anybody happens to be looking for a nice electronics project idea that they
can blog about: try building something like a Wacom stylus tablet device. I'm
curious how far you could get with just a hobby budget.

------
kalonis
I am really looking forward to read the blog post "design software like it is
20s" where someone found my commits from this year and (hopefully) comes to
the same conclusion.

------
tariksbl
"the web was still 20 years from being invented [next door]"

------
cushychicken
The circuitry is incredible, but man, seeing these examples of PCB design
makes me shudder.

I'd never want to design a printed circuit board using a ruler and a few
sheets of paper. It's suddenly wildly apparent to me why CERN funded the
creation of KiCAD.

~~~
aswanson
KiCAD is awesome. That, along with cheap pcb prototyping, has gotten me into
designing boards as a hobby.

~~~
cushychicken
It's a very fun hobby with CAD software.

Without CAD software, I could see it being an exceptionally difficult chore.

------
blattimwind
And individually color-coded cables. Lovely.

------
ngcc_hk
Why is that photos ask access to my photo library on iphone. I want to read
not to share my photo !!!

~~~
ngcc_hk
It work in my iPad but not iphone. Really ask for access to my photo.

------
fnord77
401 error

------
madengr
I have that scope on my bench, a Tek TDS 300 series.

