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Comment by treis | Hacker News Reader

>This was it, even into the 90s you could reasonable "fully understand" what the machine was doing, even with something like Windows 95 and the early internet. That started to fall apart around that time and now there are so many abstraction layers you have to choose what you specialize in.

This doesn't really track. 30 years ago computers were, more or less, the same as they are now. The only major addition has been graphics cards. Other than that we've swapped some peripherals. Don't really see how someone could "fully understand" the modem, video drivers, USB controllers, motherboard firmware, processor instruction sets, and the half dozen or so more things that went into a desktop.

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This is why you fail. Thirty years ago I could make a wire wrapped 68000k board that did nothing but play music. CE/CS was different back then. I'd cut pins and solder in chips to twiddle the filters on audio output. You could know the entire process from power on to running of your computer and it was easy to change bits even down to the hardware level like adding a 'no place to put it unless you build it yourself' CPU/MPU/RAM upgrade and make it work. Adjust your NTSC video output, just cut that resistor in lieu of replacing it with something really high resistance, it'll be better. Let's build our own new high speed serial port for MIDI. How about a graphics co-processor that only does Mandlebrot calculations, let's build three of them. Only few of the younger generation comprehend the old ways. And the machines have changed to fewer chips and machines have turned into system on a chip. It's a bit of a shame.

You would build a wire wrapped 68000 board in 1992? Isn’t that a tiny bit late to expend that much effort on a 68000?

Not at all. I was still building embedded hardware around 68k 10 years later. There are undoubtedly new products being built around 68k today.

If all you want to do is synthesize music the 68k is perfect.

If you’re taking issue with wire wrap, there just weren’t general purpose dev boards available back then. You were expected to be able to roll your own.

Wire wrap is the most reliable form of construction, used by NASA for many years for this reason - the wrapping of the wire around the square pegs creates a small cold weld at every corner.

Plus when mulitlayer boards were not really a thing, wirewrap gives you all the layers you want, more or less.

Where did one acquire your kind of knowledge outside of a university? Were there any books or USENET groups that you visited to attain it?

30 years ago was DOS computers - usb certainly wasn’t widespread even if it was out, and many of the video drivers at the time were “load palette here, copy memory there” type things.

As mentioned, we didn't have USB controller until 1996. But even if you included that, which was an order of magnitude more complex than parallel port, USB 1.0 spec was only about 100 pages long. And yes you could reasonably understand what was going on there.

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