Jim,

I totally understand A, B, and C.

I'll admit many times C seems like overkill.

On the other hand software is taking the place of hardware in just about every respect.

Look at cars.

Remember the days when you had to pull the choke out just the right distance,

pump the gas pedal just the right number of times, hit the starter and pray?

Today cars start first try summer or winter and we now take that for granted thanks to the CPU.

A, B, and C are all valid choices depending on the application. It just comes down to price and level of effort.

-Steve

On Sunday, December 12, 2021, 01:54:55 PM EST, Jim Haynes <[email protected]> wrote:

This is starting to sound like a question I posed (as a joke) to some
current college students. I need an audio amplifier with a gain of 10.
Should I
a) Build a transistor circuit for the purpose?
b) Use an op-amp and choose the input and feedback resistors to
get a gain of 10?
c) Use a microcontroller, convert the audio to digital, multiply
the numbers by 10, and convert back to audio?

The old-fashioned UARTs are out there - somebody on this list recently
said he had a bunch of them. You can use a 555 timer to make the clock
speed anything you want. Lots of Irv Hoff articles did exactly this.

Or if you want to be even more primitive you can use a handful of ordinary
logic ICs, as in the WA6JYJ speed converter published in Ham Radio back in
1971.

Now if you want ASCII-to-Baudot conversion and connection to a computer an
all that it's a more complicated story, but sending Baudot to a Teletype
machine should be duck soup.

    ---

    "Ya can argue all ya wanna, but it's dif'rent than it was."
    "No it ain't! No it ain't! But ya gotta know the territory."
        Meredith Willson, The Music Man