EEVblog #545 - Vintage Design Rant

[dr.diesel]

I wonder if Claudio D is following along?

[Stonent]

My opinion is that vintage equipment teardown like that is far more informative and interesting than modern teardown.

In the old circuits all the guts are exposed. They can be easily followed and investigated by a beginner - both the digital and analogue parts.

In a modern design, like the mentioned kindle, all you get inside is a bunch of ICs with part numbers covered up.

Besides, looking into vintage gear is like opening an old book. You get this epic feeling of uncovering the past.

You feel like Indiana Jones of electronics the minute you open up a 70's tektronix scope

You hardly need a schematic on some old stuff. You can just see everything.

[LL0rd]

My opinion is that vintage equipment teardown like that is far more informative and interesting than modern teardown.

Well, I don't know, if I can support your opinion. What was the vintage equipment part on the teardown? The analog side wasn't vintage - as Dave said. If you have to design such a calibration device today, you would probably use the same design rules. The vintage part was the digital part on the left side. And well, I wished Dave invested some more time on the vintage left digital side.

[dr.diesel]

My opinion is that vintage equipment teardown like that is far more informative and interesting than modern teardown.

In the old circuits all the guts are exposed. They can be easily followed and investigated by a beginner - both the digital and analogue parts.

Just like old cars and middle aged women, you can poke, prod, tweak and investigate without breaking anything.

[ResistorRob]

3: To Google/Youtube: Piss OFF with your frikkin' Google+ crap! I don't want Google+, just leave Youtube how it was already!

I went from being in love with Youtube to totally hating it since they started to screw with the page layout and shoving Google+ down our throats. Forcing people to use G+ might make them look more popular with a higher user count, but it will do little to increase the activity of the overall G+ on the site. To me this seems like a real stupid way to try and compete with Facebook. They just need to forget their social media dreams and stick to what they are good at: Android, Youtube, and Search.

----------------- On Rant Video ------------------

1) Dave has a lot more patience than I do. I think I would have simply replied in the comments "You're a moron" and went on with the rest of my day, lol

2) I actually do agree that I don't learn a whole lot from teardowns. That said I usually do learn something, but it doesn't vary in how much I learn whether or not it's a modern product or vintage. I do on the other hand usually learn a lot from the repair videos.

3) Dave said "only for entertainment purposes" like it was such a bad thing. There has been multiple times I watched a teardown or other electronics video and didn't learn anything, but was still glad I spent the time watching it. I'm passionate about my electronics hobby, so I actually enjoy a good video on the subject as much as someone else would watching TV or a movie. I don't think it should be required to make sure there is an educational element to every video, sometimes just the "wow, that is real cool" element is enough.

4) I don't think the Fluke calibrator was a good example to defend his point. He says "the design would be exacly the same". While it's true for this product, it wouldn't be for many if not most products. A cell phone for example would have a radically different design than a vintage one.  In the Fluke video it was one where I didn't really learn a whole lot, but I still thought the video was amazing. The parts in that thing were pure geek porn. Loved it!

5) One area teardown videos are really helpful to me is they pique my interest in something that was mentioned, next thing you know I'm on Google and I start my adventure down the rabbit hole, and by the end of it I usually learned a lot. An example of that for the Fluke video was this question I asked myself "could you replace the mechanical "sex on a stick" relays with modern solid state relays. By adventure I mean I free flow, so I could start of researching the resistances of relays and 3 hours later there is a jack-o-latern image on my oscilloscope and newly made liquor pouring robot in the kitchen with an option laser attachment. 

[nathanpc]

No argument here... It's the new crap with everything on a chip that's boring.

Finally someone said it! Vintage teardowns are a lot better.

3: To Google/Youtube: Piss OFF with your frikkin' Google+ crap! I don't want Google+, just leave Youtube how it was already!

I went from being in love with Youtube to totally hating it since they started to screw with the page layout and shoving Google+ down our throats. Forcing people to use G+ might make them look more popular with a higher user count, but it will do little to increase the activity of the overall G+ on the site. To me this seems like a real stupid way to try and compete with Facebook. They just need to forget their social media dreams and stick to what they are good at: Android, Youtube, and Search.

In my opinion Google+ comments in YouTube is a lot better than the old crap. Now you can finally have threads (instead of the horrible reply system they had before) and the layout of the comments is a lot better. Just think of it as Disqus, because you're not using Google+, just the comment engine.

[atw60444]

I find these vintage gear tear-downs very interesting and useful Dave. Keep it up! Half of my test gear is elderly HP, Telequipment, Marconi stuff. It's all relevant to me. 
 It makes a lot more sense seeing the building blocks and sections in the flesh, rather than just another custom chip or two and interconnects.
Jon

[madshaman]

D***it, I want to watch this vid so badly.  We don't even have power atm, let alone bandwidth :-(, /gripe

When I came back to electronics, I started messing with an atmega328p.  Then a very respectable individual made a comment about how I seemed to like pushing 1s and 0s around.

A bit bruised, I started seriously looking into analog.  Before I knew it I was buying books and pouring over articles written by the likes of the late Bob Pease and Jim Williams.

Soon I found myself collecting all of Tektronix' "Concepts" books and gathering together as much of this stuff as I could.

A few years later my entire life was changed and I haven't even absorbed a fraction of all this knowledge yet.

The mere suggestion that nothing of value can be learned from "vintage" technology is the most ludicrous position I've heard put forth in my entire life.

There isn't a word in the English language that can come remotely close to communicating the new level of stupidity this suggests.

[driradar]

There isn't a word in the English language that can come remotely close to communicating the new level of stupidity this suggests.


But there is a known explanation: DUNNING KRUGER (basically, they are too stupid to realise how stupid they are]

[Gintoki]

Dave is spot on, you can definetley learn something from old designs, especially the analog designs

Btw. where on earth does one get Tellurium Copper Banana Sockets? Farnell dosn't have them as far as I can see

[ResistorRob]

In my opinion Google+ comments in YouTube is a lot better than the old crap. Now you can finally have threads (instead of the horrible reply system they had before) and the layout of the comments is a lot better. Just think of it as Disqus, because you're not using Google+, just the comment engine.

I like the nested comments too, but there is absolutely no technical reason that someone needs to join Google+ to have nested comments. Now you have to go to the Google+ website to see if you have Youtube replies. Forcing people to use something they don't want is equally as stupid. Google is drunk with power, I'm starting to rethink buying a new Android phone next month. I switched my homepage from Google to Bing as well. Allowing stylized comments and url's are a spammers dream. I expect to see a nice bump in the amount of spam in the very near future.

Btw. where on earth does one get Tellurium Copper Banana Sockets? Farnell dosn't have them as far as I can see

eBay 

[alanb]

Looking and learning from old designs both good and bad is essential.

To quote George Santayana 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it'

[driradar]

There isn't a word in the English language that can come remotely close to communicating the new level of stupidity this suggests.


But there is a known explanation: DUNNING KRUGER (basically, they are too stupid to realise how stupid they are]

Sorry, I was referring to Claudio D.

[Terabyte2007]

Dave,

 I agree with you 100%. I love tearing down old vintage gear just to learn about the early fundamentals of how they overcame certain design problems. It's because of our engineering past is why we have many of the everyday advancements in technology we have today. I think it's extremely vital for any beginner to understand the past before trying to master the now.

[rstoer]

I'm with Dave 100% on this one. I like seeing teardowns of high-end vintage test equipment as I often find them a better dollar value than similar new items from China. So for me these are also product reviews. I especially enjoyed the 5450A video as I buy and sell a lot of Fluke equipment of that vintage but have never had one of those.
I'm glad Dave pushed back. Thumbs Up!

[Dave]

I prefer watching teardowns of vintage precision gear to new stuff, simply because they don't contains as many custom specialty parts that would be unobtainable by a hobbyist. I like to lie to myself: "I could make that", when I see some intriguing design. I find it even more impressive to see a 30-year-old multimeter that outperforms many modern instruments. That's exactly why I have half a dozen vintage meters in my possession, some more than 10 years older than I am.

I can imagine how freaking boring a Kindle teardown would be:
A retarded case design, impossible to get into without breaking half of the retaining clips. Wow, look, a super tight PCB layout. Everything is custom, so I wont even bother to look up any of the part numbers. The PCB is multilayer, so you won't see anything. Well that about does it for this one.

[MagFlux]

I believe that Claudio D. has got the message after 3 pages of people mostly ripping him a new one.
The simple message would be "the wheel has already been invented", look a what as come before and improve it or modify it for your purposes.

[Dread]

I could not believe that someone had complained about tearing down vintage equipment!
Dave got this 100% correct, as a matter of fact what I find to be a waste of time is tearing down new equipment.

Electronic Engineering is almost a dead field because most of the ground work has already been done by engineers throughout the 1960's to late 1990's.  What we have now are mostly materials and chemical engineers going through trying how to fit and meld existing designs into ever shrinking integrated component packages.  If you wan't to learn anything about electronics you have to go back to a point in time when the actual design was splayed out on the board and not hidden in a chip.

Well done Dave I give this a 10 out 10 and I hope you teardown more and more vintage stuff because thats what will create the future engineers.

[Ericho]

I could not believe that someone had complained about tearing down vintage equipment!

+1 I don't get it either  I love thru hole vintage stuff

This rand video is this months favorite of mine, especially the last 2 sentences. 

[M0BSW]

 At work we have the  Golden turd award, given out to people usually management when they messed up somehow, perhaps you could do similar as it's your blog site/forum, for anyone who makes such mistakes, you may like to consider calling it the GOLDEN TURD AWARD  or PILLOCK OF THE WEEK AWARD, or WHOOPS I  WISHED ID KEPT MY MOUTH SHUT AWARD, I commend this idea to the  members
ps encase you were wondering, the golden turd is a plastic replica plastic turd bought from a joke/ prank shop, sprayed golden and mounted on a piece of ply wood, and presented to the latest victim,on a Friday lunch time in the canteen where full applause and jeering takes place.

[walshms]

ps encase you were wondering, the golden turd is a plastic replica plastic turd bought from a joke/ prank shop, sprayed golden and mounted on a piece of ply wood, and presented to the latest victim,on a Friday lunch time in the canteen where full applause and jeering takes place.

If you really want it to have impact, sprinkle it with a little bit of "eau de skunk". 

I do hope everyone there is really good-natured about it.  There are some people that would not take it well.

[M0BSW]

"Oh Yes" it's never taken seriously, some have 4 of them

[walshms]

Four?!? 

I think I'd have done everything I could to have avoided the second!

[BiOzZ]

I like the vintage teardowns .... they use methods of accomplishing their goal using standard chips that today you can get just one small chip for and they use nice large properly marked parts and 1 or 2 layer boards that make reverse engineering easy

i had no idea how a microcontrollers worked before taking apart some old equipment that used a microprocessor!

i say more retro teardowns!

[free_electron]

At work we have the  Golden turd award, given out to people usually management when they messed up somehow, perhaps you could do similar as it's your blog site/forum, for anyone who makes such mistakes, you may like to consider calling it the GOLDEN TURD AWARD  or PILLOCK OF THE WEEK AWARD, or WHOOPS I  WISHED ID KEPT MY MOUTH SHUT AWARD, I commend this idea to the  members
ps encase you were wondering, the golden turd is a plastic replica plastic turd bought from a joke/ prank shop, sprayed golden and mounted on a piece of ply wood, and presented to the latest victim,on a Friday lunch time in the canteen where full applause and jeering takes place.

a golden-foot-in-mouth award.