John Curl's Blowtorch preamplifier part II

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Wayne and Demian, did you guys use the same ceramic for your boards? Perhaps that is the best solution.

The stuff we use is the Rogers 4350 series nicer to work with than the old Teflon back when I did Rf. Nice and stable, doesn't absorb water and solders at high temps. I think it sounds a bit better based on feedback. Apparently other people do also just found out this one won a preamp of the year from TAS.
Those Vendettas still look great today and still a reference.
 
Intel 8088 running at a lightning 4.77 MHz rate, shifting them there bits around it gigantic 640 kB memory!

Ah, those were the days of thunder! :D
Yes, those were the days ... when software just did the job it was supposed to do, without massive layers of w@nker addons, which just get in the way of achieving the desired goal. The peak of software creativity was around late 80's or so, and it's stagnated since then - just mainly ever more lollypop stuff in your face. As someone who has been in the game for 30 years or so, the state of software design methodologies is pretty depressing - almost as bad as audio engineering philosophies, :D ...
 
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Yes, those were the days ... when software just did the job it was supposed to do, without massive layers of w@nker adddons, which just get in the way of achieving the desired goal. The peak of software creativity was around late 80's or so, and it's stagnated since then - just mainly ever more lollypop stuff in your face. As someone who has been in the game for 30 years or so, the state of software design methodologies is pretty depressing - almost as bad as audio engineering philosophies, :D ...
I was watching one of those webinar on mixing . Surprise tip to add depth use more distance from the mic. :rolleyes: I do agree with your assessment of audio engineering philosophies. ;)
 
Yes, those were the days ... when software just did the job it was supposed to do, without massive layers of w@nker adddons, which just get in the way of achieving the desired goal. The peak of software creativity was around late 80's or so, and it's stagnated since then - just mainly ever more lollypop stuff in your face. As someone who has been in the game for 30 years or so, the state of software design methodologies is pretty depressing - almost as bad as audio engineering philosophies, :D ...

That is a remarkable position to take, which can only be due to a lack of knowledge of current developments. Just give us one specific example of software that would fit your appreciation, and I will give you five where the opposite is true.
 
That is a remarkable position to take, which can only be due to a lack of knowledge of current developments. Just give us one specific example of software that would fit your appreciation, and I will give you five where the opposite is true.
Lack of knowledge of current developments?? I poke my head into the mess every now and again to see if there has been any significant movement - and to date there hasn't been ... there are a few, interesting bit players around the edges doing worthwhile things, but their efforts are largely ignored.

No, I'm going to throw it over to you - name five, tremendously significant recent software developments ... ones with real meat, not dressed up variations of stuff decades old ...

... and you can rely on Pavel to throw in a generous pleasantry in these exchanges, :p ...
 
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Frank, where do you get this stuff from? Is it like your pronouncements on sound quality evaluated through PC speakers? :D

Do you remember what people were mostly authoring with in 1980? The adventurous ones were on Pascal, and C, and the rest were hacking around in Basic, Assember and the next great thing was Forth. There were no IDE's for embedded development, and OOPs was still being formulated in academia. No C+, no C++ or C#. It's precisely because of increased computing power and a bit later GUI's that launched a wave of creativity in the industry bringing new tools, methodologies and lots of language development. And soon after that, the internet, and still more languages to deal with all of the associated challenges. Today there are dozens of highly specialized languages for web applications, graphics, data base, security and so on.

But, we need to see your pronouncements on most things for what they are: the harmless, flapjackery of an elderly man.
 
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bonsai, I can see you're part of Pavels' generation too ... ;)

still more languages to deal with all of the associated challenges. Today there are dozens of highly specialized languages for web applications, graphics, data base, security and so on.
And that's exactly the problem: tools, tools, tools, coming out of the orifices ... left, right and bottom. None of them one ounce more intelligent or sophisticated than the one prior - they are all caught up in the "I wanna get onta the bandwagon!!" ... they all require the programmer to grind away endlessly to achieve anything, it's a nightmare unless you're young and have boundless energy ...

I was highly optimistic in the 90's, thinking we were getting close to having high level design tools where the problem, the desired outcome could be stated in something close to normal human thinking, and then the final, fully functional, bug-free(!!!!!) version could evolve in an straightforward, interactive way with the users and skilled designer .... hahhhhh!!! what a laugh - we're still just as far from those goals as we ever were ...

We have tonnes of slickness in the interfaces, but very tiny increments in real "smartness" under the hood - which to me is the key ingredient for getting the job done ... I'm a functionality man, not into bells and whistles ...
 
There used to be a saying 'What Andy Grove giveth, Bill Gates taketh away again.'. That's what's been wrong (bloat and bling) and I concur with Frank for the most part.

Let's take one example - my first schematic and PCB design package was Protel, running under Windows 3.1. If I could run that package on today's hardware I'm sure it would smoke, but nowadays I can only get 'Altium' which integrates so much stuff I never want and will never use.
 
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There used to be a saying 'What Andy Grove giveth, Bill Gates taketh away again.'. That's what's been wrong (bloat and bling) and I concur with Frank for the most part.

Let's take one example - my first schematic and PCB design package was Protel, running under Windows 3.1. If I could run that package on today's hardware I'm sure it would smoke, but nowadays I can only get 'Altium' which integrates so much stuff I never want and will never use.

I have stuck with PCAD 2006 Altium is on my machine but I haven't made the switch yet. From Tango on dos to PCAD was always improving but Altium is just too much for me. I guess I am turning into a curmudgeon.
 
Can you imagine coding a web page in assembler, or basic? Or writing modern graphics intensive games in the same? Or navigating the web without HTML?

Tell us exactly what it is that you think is wrong. Be specific.
That higher level methods of specifying what a program is required to do have not evolved - virtually all the languages are still caught up in requiring each tiny, boring step to be specified - and that it has to be 100% correctly stated for the end result to work.

Think of it this way: I want my kitchen to make a chocolate cake, :D; I want the kitchen to come back to me and say, OK, do you want a chocolate cake exactly like I made once in the past, or do you want one that is a variation, or do you want to try a completely different recipe. Okay, a variation today... now what should I vary, and by roughly how much ...

The reality is, still, that I largely have to say, Go to the pantry, find some flour, bring the flour to the kitchen bench; now go find a mixing container, etc, etc, etc, etc .... geddit??

Yes, some of the straightforward, interface stuff can be easily determined these days ... but the gutsy, behind the scenes stuff - the "meat" - still has to be done in the same, laborious manner ... it wore me out, doing it !!!!

As a counter-example, there is a single high level tool for setting up a business system - where all one has to do is specify the Business Rules, in a human-friendly way, for a fully functional system to be spat out ... one and one only, that I'm aware of ... :rolleyes:
 
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