I feel like we’re standing on the shoulders of giants twiddling our thumbs when I read stories like this.
Each wire strand had to be carefully put in place and soldered or specially wire wrapped manually: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_wrap
If you make a mistake, it was so painful. Today we use PCBs and if we make a mistake, we just reuse 99% of the PCB design. Once it is done, repeating the PCB design cost you almost nothing.
In the past,when you needed to make something again, you needed to make all the connections again manually. That increased the cost so much and made stupid errors abundant as humans make stupid errors all the time.
It will also took a long time for a computer to be done.
People working there having access to computers were privileged people. Now I can control a huge CNC machine, the watering of the plants and a 3D printer with a computer that fits on my hand and cost peanuts.
That is magic for me.
It seems to be that wire wrapping isn't very popular nowadays, and that hobbyists tend to use breadboards [1]. Is there a particular reason for that?
I believe even “back then” the wire wrap was only used on backplanes; modules plugged into those were through-hole PCBs plugged directly into the posts that were wrapped around in the other side.
While I'm not firmly in the camp that "everything was better in the old days", it clearly wasn't, I do wonder if we've taken a detour. There's nothing wrong with taking some of the added speed we gain from modern hardware, and use it to great language and frameworks that get us through implementation faster, but are we developing things faster? Best I can tell, SAGE took four years to build, that's pretty fast for what it is and given that much of the hardware also had to be designed and build. I don't think the modern day equivalent could be build that fast, regardless of much better tooling.
Part of the problem, as I see it, is misdirected effort. Most problems we're trying to solve is attacked with way more effort and ambition that required. Electron is a great example, it really does solve a problem and it truly does speedup development. That great, but why use it to build chat applications? Chat was basically solved by the year 2000. I use Google Chat of work, it's only better than IRC in two key feature. 1) I can instantly setup a video call. 2) I can bombard my coworkers with stupid reaction gifs. That is it. Add TLS to IRC, and it is better in most other aspects.
Or how about webshops? We've been able to buy stuff only since 1995, has the experience really improved? No, not really, not in any meaningful sense. Yet somehow I now need a Kubernetes cluster, even tough my servers are a 1000 times faster. Can't a modern server handle at least the same amount of traffic? Why do I need 5MB of Javascript to buy a book?
We're spending too much time solving problems that we successfully handled decades ago, and we're often claim to have a better solution, when it's really just prettier.
You could even call it 'Positron' or something like that.
Added bonus: repeat this process monthly to ensure you stay up to date!