.. and the future is ANALOG!

[jan.didden]

Good read!

http://www.analog.com/library/analog...es_part_1.html

Jan Didden

[SY]

Cool article. I felt bad about not knowing the answer to one of the questions, but once I glommed onto the idea that it was fiction....

[ingrast]

Good and thought provoking, as anything from Gilbert.

Literary merits aside (...) Gilbert leans on a rather partisan stance - he is fully entitled from his distinguished career - about an analoge vs. digital worldview and thier relative merits or demerits.

In fact this is probably a no-opposition, as much as IT professionals should not camp in the hardware vs. software sides as which is the fundamental, the one that feeds the industry.

Digital systems by themselves represent a futher level of abstraction - something smartly pointed at in the article - amenable to be implemented with fundamentally different technologies as long as the basic functional blocks are available.

Analog engineers cannot fairly be praised as "better" engineers just because they are closer to the Fundamentals. Both are needed and at the current level of knowledge accumulation, it cannot be hoped to be equally proficient in both realms at the same time.

By formation I feel much closer to the free spirited, closer to Fundamentals type. But I will readily admire highly skilled software based young engineers no matter how far they feel and work from Fundamentals.

Only do not ask them how an oscillator starts. It should be unfair.

Rodolfo

[phn]

Depends on what future you refer to--an abstract future or a real future. Nobody has yet been able to combine the two. Nietzsche tried and all it got him was syphilis. The sin of knowledge.