Are you aware Estonia is a very small country?
Sure, my euphemism
Estonia, last time I traveled from
Rakvere to
Tallinn, it was 110Km (68 miles), and from
Tallinn to Karksi-Nuia, it was 230Km (143 miles).
Italy, last time I traveled from Milan to Bologna, it was 220Km, while from Milan to Rome, it was 570Km.
Just, except Tallinn, Similar to Finland and Sweden, Estonia's population density is one of Europe's lowest, something like 30 per Km^2, so when you travel, your perception of distances becomes greater.
I started in 2010. At that time there was the internet. But contents were not available like it is now. I had to do a Microcontroller course. Had to spend around 3 hours in class 3 or 4 days a week for 2 months.
Electronics, specially digital stuff, weren't nearly as complex as today (TTL, CMOS, relatively simple CPUs) so with few books you were ok.
Yes exactly.
I am disposing of a load of data books and reading some of the manuals on CPUs I used to program (Z180 Z280 H8 - the list is below) they are just relatively little books. Today's stuff is 10x more complex, although obviously a lot of the principles continue to be useful.
The Big Negative of online publication is that
because it is so easy, there is a lot of dross around. This isn't just in programming (with perhaps 90% of the stuff on Stackexchange etc being of no use) but in other fields. If you are a pilot then you will know about the vast increase in notams published, where every d1ckhead who can write a sentence, sort of, is publishing notams for airports about mostly trivia. One learns to speed read...
The less savoury aspect is
clickbait. I have just spent a few hours learning how to do some very simple stuff with javascript embedded in page html. I reckon half of the examples on websites do not work. Many of these are set up in huge fonts, probably by someone who knew about website design but nothing about the topic.
Then you get so many youtube videos. I hate these. I have had to watch quite a few and many of them are useless. The narrative is done by someone whose English is so poor I can't work it out. This is true for some ST videos!
The one clear positive of the internet is that one does not need data books and the shelf space can be used for other stuff - like CP/M 2.2 manuals which you have for sale in the vintage computer section of Ebay
Those are sensible points.
When I came back to embedded systems after 20 years, I was both pleased how quickly I got back to where I had been, and horrified at how little had changed (except smaller, cheaper, faster). In other words the fundamentals had not changed.
Unfortunately gurgle deliberately de-emphasises unchanging fundamentals in favour of transient twittering.
Stack exchange is OK if you want to know which button to use to floggle the squirdle and turn it green. Understanding -not so much.
Very few videos are worth the time spent to see if they might be worth watching. Easy to ignore.
A key difference between when I was growing up and my daughter was growing up is
- I had to know how to find information, and then to glean everything possible from that little which I found
- my daughter has to learn how to quickly decide what to ignore, so that she can concentrate on the small proportion that is useful
And in that vein, videos are prime candidates for ignoring.
The web is great for
searching, but less good for
serendipitous browsing. (Despite my using a browser right now!)
If you know the 8051, learned the 8051 quirks, and had all the right resources in hand for 8051 projects, it would take quite a push to move away from an 8051 microcontroller. Of course, there are still 8051 fanboys today, probably all minted in the 1980s.
My senior design project at university was based on the 87C51. That should give you an idea of the timeframe.
I just put an EFM8UB1 into a design.
Fanboy? Maybe.
RS had a set of large folders with a data library on many of the chips they supplied.
Al of manufacturers would send you samples and datasheets.
The real question is, how do we survive internet.
JW
Being far from everything was different.
Standard components were easy, even here some importers offered almost free databooks but final products were other thing.
If product itself didn't include enough information, like schematics inside the case, the situation became very difficult if the case was more than general user stuff.
So when you had some occasional info at hand you knew its value, like jumpers and DIP switches of the machine, pocketbook was one of those things, other one was a driver disk and well known example of it is NE2000 network adapter.
And if you were at the customer you better ask and check their never used part of their office storage, missing manuals had probably been there all these years, including original plastic bag with warning flips and travel locks.
I guess that original plastic bag is still there and now it includes original driver and manual CDs.
Service info was generally as it is now, if local service organization was established free info was limited.
Other end was that nobody was blocking anything because nobody knew anything, maybe importer was just a bit lazy, later even manufacturer was a bit unknown.
Rebadging was one thing but then Taiwan and Korea started appearing with their never-heard-of brands, also some lesser known from Japan.
Luckily computer internals were pretty standard and consumers learned pretty fast that known brand is better, even if a bit pricier.
For computers USB and Plug'n'Pray became very helpful, finally when praying was less necessary.
Then net before Google was many times much better than it is today.
Now much more info is available but, like it is said, SNR is occasionally very bad.
It's everyday more clear that Google is actually not a search engine, maybe it used to be so but not anymore.
So finally circle is closing, regular stuff is easy and the rest are what they are.
Though no idea if it's really just Google, maybe those old pages just are not there anymore.
Google doesn't generally keep old stuff. It trawls the net and if some info (for which it kept the URL where it found it) is no longer there, it removes it from its cache. So as websites die, their content is lost. Google is not an archive; other websites have to perform that function.
One of the really annoying things is that distis are totally clueless today. I don't think any of the main ones can quote you for a 4k7 0805 1% resistor. They need a P/N, but there are many P/Ns, at a vast range of prices.
Google doesn't generally keep old stuff. It trawls the net and if some info (for which it kept the URL where it found it) is no longer there, it removes it from its cache. So as websites die, their content is lost. Google is not an archive; other websites have to perform that function.
I don't object to that practice.
I do object to gurgle "hiding in plain sight" good solid information that has not needed to be changed recently, and emphasising new (and transient) chit-chat. I know that is better for gurgle's profit, but it is a change for the worse.
The original gurgle page rank emphasised information that had many pages pointing to it, on the grounds that implied that many people thought it was worthy information. That "science citation index" type facillity was invaluable.
There are a few old sources of info that haven't been mentioned yet.
1. Reader Service Cards.
Back in the days before the Internet in any form, you just wander up to your favorite magazine stand and pick up either a hobbyist or professional electronics magazine. Bound into the back of the magazine was a postcard. Tear it out, fill in your name and mailing address, then start reading the magazine. At the bottom of every ad there was a note that said something like "Circle Reader Service Card #XXX for more info". Circle the numbers that interested you, mail the card, and wait. After a while, goodies would start trickling in to your mailbox. Databooks, app notes, even free samples. It wasn't fast, but it worked.
2. The D.A.T.A. series of databooks
D.A.T.A. == Derivation And Tabulation Associates. Yeah, I know. That's so bad. They should be ashamed of themselves. The D.A.T.A. books were multi-vendor catalogs divided up into catagories. i.e. transistors, linear ICs, digital ICs, etc. But they were professional-level items that were hideously expensive.
3. EEM Catalog
EEM == Electronic Engineers Master (Catalog)
Another multi-vendor catalog that was somewhat easier to get than the D.A.T.A. books. Over a thousand pages of goodness. Some vendors just put in glossy-brochure level info, some put in their full catalog. I recently used the 1983 EEM catalog to find the basic specs of a low-aging double-oven OCXO that was sold in the 1980s. Here's a link to Archive.org's collection of a few issues:
https://archive.org/search.php?query=%22electronic%20engineers%20master%22
There are a few old sources of info that haven't been mentioned yet.
1. Reader Service Cards.
Back in the days before the Internet in any form, you just wander up to your favorite magazine stand and pick up either a hobbyist or professional electronics magazine. Bound into the back of the magazine was a postcard. Tear it out, fill in your name and mailing address, then start reading the magazine. At the bottom of every ad there was a note that said something like "Circle Reader Service Card #XXX for more info". Circle the numbers that interested you, mail the card, and wait. After a while, goodies would start trickling in to your mailbox. Databooks, app notes, even free samples. It wasn't fast, but it worked.
I don't think those worked outside North America.
Ebook readers a lot of stuff very well still, hacker new on a vt term looks basically the same but on a green tube.
Lucky days when you found a free seat in the university laboratory, so you could access the BBS
Blue and yellow books. That's the answer. Those books were found in beige lockers. That was an easy one. Next.
clickbait [..]
Then you get so many youtube videos. I hate these.
Some Youtubers do it only for money and their videos don't add any good information, just something grabbed from the Wikipedia.
Google doesn't generally keep old stuff. It trawls the net and if some info (for which it kept the URL where it found it) is no longer there, it removes it from its cache. So as websites die, their content is lost. Google is not an archive; other websites have to perform that function.
I don't object to that practice.
Most people don't understand search engines, and that's *a big* problem
- Google (USA)
64.233.160.0 - 64.233.191.255
66.102.0.0 - 66.102.15.255
66.249.64.0 - 66.249.95.255
72.14.192.0 - 72.14.255.255
74.125.0.0 - 74.125.255.255
209.85.128.0 - 209.85.255.255
216.239.32.0 - 216.239.63.255
- Yandex (Russia)
5.255.192.0 - 5.255.255.255
5.45.254.0 - 5.45.254.127
37.9.109.0 - 37.9.109.255
37.140.128.0 - 37.140.191.255
- Yahoo (USA, Sunnyvale, California, Verizon Communications)
...
- Ecosia (Europe, based in Berlin, Germany, B Corporation status certification)
...
- Bing (USA, Microsoft and third-party tracking tools)
...
- DuckDuckGo (USA, based in Paoli, Pennsylvania, in Greater Philadelphia)
...
- Baidu (China)
Last time I visited China, I learned that if you try to access Google from inland China, you will be redirected to Google dot hk, but, depending on your query, results will be filtered or not available at all. Not available in China are also Yahoo and DuckDuckGo, since Baidu and Sogou is what you are supposed to use.
- Sogou (China)
Sogou has developed its own algorithm and this has been very useful for companies who target an audience in low tier locations due to more affordable pay-per-click campaigns.
- Shenma (China)
a joint venture between Alibaba and UC Web, it's a mobile search engine for Chinese shopping and Chinese apps
- Haosou (China + Hong Kong)
also known as 360OU, internal search engine for market share, but it also goes beyond China and arrives in Hong Kong, where it's a great stuff to use.
- Youdao (China, mandarin learners friendly)
highly appreciated by mandarin learners thanks to the free online Chinese-To-English dictionary that comes with it
- Weibo (China)
It has often been considered the equivalent of Twitter in China, but it's not a blog-social engine, it also a net-scanner.
- ...
These
net-scanning-engines only scan the net - sometimes checking "robot.txt" or the like to better understand the website they are visiting - and address things for browsers.
Then there are
archiving engines, things that capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future.
But, according to the international laws
- it's only available for sites that allow crawlers
- the site owner can request pages and cache deletion
- Wayback machine (web dot archive dot org)
207.241.233.214
185.177.93.166
185.220.101.142
185.220.103.4
198.245.53.182
109.70.100.47
94.16.117.236
95.216.18.152
51.91.110.170
45.135.229.10
37.1.202.102
151.106.9.30
109.201.133.6
135.181.35.237
116.203.50.155
151.80.230.8
78.129.165.8 - Stillio
- archive.today
- PageFreezer
- WebCite
- Yubnub
Alexa (retired from Amazon on May 1, 2022)- Time Travel
(forgot to say, there is also a kind of "Chinese Microsoft bing", I mean thanks to Microsoft’s willingness to comply with local Chinese regulations, you can use Microsoft Bing dot cn in China to access to a western search engine without using a VPN. Well, ... there is cooperation with the government, but search results are filtered by local censorship. Better than nothing)
I'm about to start an ESP32 project and today I saw someone on a forum mention that the GPIO pin toggle speed was way slower than the clock speed would suggest. I checked the ESP32 sitting on my desk and two minutes later I was looking at this post https://www.esp32.com/viewtopic.php?t=1595 which confirmed the behavior.
So how did you find out about this kind of stuff prior to internet making information searchable?
Prior to the internet we got our info from paper datasheets and application notes. And then we didn't
need to ask questions like the one above, because we knew what the parts did and didn't have addled ideas of their capabilities. Manufacturers knew that providing comprehensive, accurate and easy to understand documentation would boost the popularity of their devices.
But then - just as the internet started to become useful - chips got more complex while 'datasheets' were pared down to little more than a list of features. Finally the Chinese started making their own chips, and often didn't publish datasheets in English if at all. Nowadays a lot of popular devices are treated like black boxes whose innards we are not
supposed to know about, so we are forced to troll the net looking for posts like the one above to get the information we need.
A Google search will bring up heaps of 'information' for sure, but much of it is low quality. Recently I was looking for an answer to a question on Stack Exchange about how to reliably receive serial data on a PIC MCU. I found dozens of slick web pages with tutorials that provided example code, but only
one that showed you how to handle overrun errors. There were also heaps of posts from users admitting that their devices locked up from time to time, and they were just putting up with it! The best info came came from a post on
PICList.com, which started out as an email list at MIT back in 2007.
I had a large bookshelf stuffed with data books, and the Philips rep on the other end of the phone.
Debugging code was by LED, 'scope, brain power. And on one occasion printing out the code on fan-fold paper, spreading it out on the office floor and spending days crawling up and down tracing the code flow. You had to fix your own bugs - no-one else could help you.
Prior to my professional career the only source of info was hobby magazines and the woefully inadequate "electronics" section of my local library.
Digging up this thread again...
I have a load of data books, from the 1980-2000 sort of era. These will eventually get binned, which seems a shame. Someone was going to take them and pay for shipping, but this didn't work out. So I am posting them here again. 3 photos here
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/qjvnupyh698nk1x/AABsWUss7e9MiM1ZF5bbSVIXa?dl=0
It would be a shame.
There are a small number that might interest me. Where are you in the UK; that might remove the postage costs.
We did not know what we did not know, and therefore information search was not that difficult. Bigger problem was parts availability. You could have data books, magazines and stuff but much of it was just an amazing paperweight because you could not get parts.
I am in the south east.
Ideally I'd like someone to take the whole lot.
