[Elecraft] Interesting Read: Dinosaur Concepts - why are we always so conservative?

[Ron D'Eau Claire]

Right now the cheapest and most powerful tool in most designer's arsenal is
digital signal processing and digital control systems. 

Remember the old saying, "When all you have is a hammer, everything begins
to look like a nail." 

We humans are designed to process and analyze analog data, not digital data.
That's why we love pictures and graphs but can't make sense out of the
racket of a raw digital signal fed to an audio transducer. All of our senses
work with analog inputs.

The fastest computers I ever used are still among the fastest today at the
tasks they are designed for, and that was back in the 1960's. They were
analog computers. 

Digital systems became popular in recent decades because the hardware became
absurdly cheap, both in cost and energy demand. With this technology, one
can take an absurd "brute force" approach to a problem, including going to
extremes trying to produce an analog output humans can work with
efficiently, and come up with an acceptable result at an acceptable price
(aided by an overwhelming amount of marketing saying "if it's digital it's
better!").

But just considering the millions of active devices and the huge number of
lines of code it takes to accomplish even a simple task shows just what a
"brute force" solution digital systems are today, especially when one
realizes that 99.9% of the same results can be had with a handful of analog
parts and one or two active devices. 

What we haven't done over the past few decades is develop analog
technologies that can be "cookie-cutter" stamped out by the billions at
cheaply as digital integrated circuits. 

It is true that digital systems are amazingly valuable and useful but, like
Alley Oop's stone axe in Moo, because they're invaluable today doesn't mean
they aren't just a stop gap until we develop a more efficient technology
better adapted to our analog senses. 

In the meantime there are those right here who prefer a K2 or K1 to a K3.
And many who prefer an older vacuum tube rig to any of those. They aren't
just 'conservative' or 'dinosaurs'. Many, perhaps most, are just
connoisseurs of good analog signal processing which, for their purposes,
they find better than even the best of today's digital systems.  

Ron AC7AC




-----Original Message-----
This was published in 2007, and makes no reference to our exalted Elecraft
K3, but it's still very interesting reading, and indirectly on topic.

Thanks to Adam Farson, VE7OJ / AB4OJ, for translation and hosting:
http://www.ab4oj.com/dl/misc/dinosaur_concepts.pdf

73,
Steve
NN4X