Our computerized Life
Can we live without computers ?
Living today means literally being surrounded by computers and that does not mean you can see them. They are everywhere and serve us.
I was born in 1973, which was a few years before personal computers became widely available. When I was a kid, no one had a portable phone and most households didn’t have a computer either. Telephones had cables and if you were out, nobody could call you.
Despite I didn’t miss anything in regards of technology, things got better with the years. We had a small black and white television with aerial reception and only with the 1986 FIFA World Cup my father decided to get a colour television. Still without cable connection, of course. Such devices were completely analog, there was not a single processing unit involved to get the job done.
Very early in my life I became interested in electronics and started to tear down just about anything with electronics inside. Here, too, almost everything was analog. Just a few digital logic chips could be seen for on-off toggles or other simple digital logics. At that time I wasn’t very fond of digital electronics because I did not understand them and my opinion was that everything should be “classic” eletronics.
Over the years I was bringing home a multitude of defective devices from small radios up to large tube televisions or video tape recorders, very much to the dislike of my mother. One day I got a Grundig VS310 video tape recorder and what was completely stunning here was the fact that the entire servo control logic was done using a standard microprocessor with dedicated RAM and ROM. It was clearly visible in this machine how a microcomputer was responsible for the operation of the machine.
You have to remember that back in these days, electronic devices such as TVs and VCRs used to have a “motherboard” with many plug in cards for every function. Compared to today, where everything consists of one board with a computer-like setup (CPU, RAM, ROM, I/O), these vintage devices seemed much more complicated yet so much less integrated.
Fast-forward a decade or two I was still relunctand to adopt digital circuits because from the view of an electronics fan, having to programm a microprocessor instead of calculating resistor values seemed so different if not perverting electronics itself. Yet more and more devices became more and more integrated leading to cheap televisions with only one PCB the size of a human hand. What the hell could you repair on these when everything you see was highly integrated custom chips ?
I lost interest in electronics and became fascinated by computers. This was not new, but I had a new focus. If I learned how to program computers I might better understand digital electronics I thought.
It was only with the advent of Arduino and similar development boards that I regained interest in small home made circuits. I had grown up and I suddenly found programming these boards wasn’t too complicated once you adopt the underlaying approach: You have a programmable CPU with many inputs and outputs and what you basically do is telling the CPU what to do with these.
Switch on Output 1 after one second. Turn off Output 2 when Input 1 is high. Simple, no ?
Today in 2023 and even in the years before, you are surrounded by computers. Your car certainly has more than one, and is mostly computerized assuming its less than 10 years old. Even your stove is programmable, the simple power supply for your MacBook is computerized and your bluetooth box isn’t much more than a microprocessor (or two) hooked up to a digital (!) amplifier and a bluetooth module which itself is highly integrated.
I didn’t even mention your smartphone since that is overly obvious. Besides it is more than a little pocket computer: Fitting in your pocket it has the power of a supercomputer sporting more computational power than car-sized supercomputers had just a jew fears ago.
I don’t know where we are heading to, but without microprocessors – or computers on the broadest sense — today’s world would stand still.
Computers also help us reducing our footprint. Because everything has to become smaller and smaller, the power dissipation had to be minimized resulting in reduced power consumption and intelligent power features. This helps us all in an environmental way — we only need to find a way to produce these devices without that much grey energy and exploitation. Fast.
