EEVblog #545 - Vintage Design Rant

Dave replies to a youtube comment that you can't learn much practical design stuff from vintage teardown videos.

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[aronbjr]

You learn electrical AND mechanical AND product design.  A product is made of many disciplines… as many as it takes (or took) to get the job done, electronics, optical, mechanical, and any combination thereof.   I still buy surplus and sometimes old technical stuff just to see the methods used let alone the engineering tech noted above.  The methods used to make some older products are sometimes forgotten, or can be reused in another area of engineering.  If you can’t appreciate the design aspects of an older product (some have more than others), you are missing a BIG part of your engineering / technical learning experience !  Thanks Dave ! ! !

[Audiobungalow]

Well, beyond simple usefulness, these vintage teardowns are a lovely look into electronics history and some beautiful design work. I, for one, am very glad you do 'em, Dave.

[Slugsie]

As someone who isn't an electronics engineer, but someone who just enjoys finding out how things work, I find value in *all* teardowns irrespective of the age of the item under scrutiny.

[drdiesel]

Haters gonna hate, you tell 'em Dave.

[georgelewisray]

Your analysis and insight really makes the tech/elec world a much better place, thanks for what you do . . . !!!

[gglovato]

Excellent video, shows how the host pays attention to all the comments, even the negative ones. (btw, i'm all in for any kind of teardown, i like vintage ones specially as they show how they solved complex problems in times where they didn't had the insane integration we have today)

[m.j.morshead]

vintage is where it's at for me, nothing like finding goldmines of quality reusable parts for my magic smoke inventions lol.

[jonconnellnyc]

The message in the video is so very true. The designers of 50 years ago - in my opinion - were more often than not better engineers than today's crop - and the simple reason was that they had to be.  Before 1990, Electronics was a horrible and intimidating profession.  In the past I have worked inside some beautiful old test equipment form the 70's - the level of analogue knowledge, mechanical design and materials skills is impressive. I once repaired a vintage 60's-70's (but still incredibly useful) B&K Pico-scale inductance meter - which was crafted from beautiful materials, used every trick in the book to maintain accuracy - and was actually packed internally with sawdust to keep the stray capacitances constant. We should never forget that until the early 90's the majority of designers worked without any mcad and ecad and that an analogue design often meant  designing 20 or so discrete transistors using only spec-sheet graphs plus a pocket calculator - my boss in 1981 still used a slide-rule - "because it was quicker" btw. Spec sheets were in dusty folders on lab shelves. There was very little simulation capability - and what existed  was less than user-friendly, extremely slow and could only accommodate a few nodes at a time. With minimal ic functionality and very little integrated functionality on Silicon, designers needed to do a ton of sleight of hand to get to the outputs they required. If you take the time to look inside a 1950's television set  and really understand what the designers did you will never stop slapping your forehead in surprise at the inspired genius of almost every component layout.  For fit and cost reasons a block of digital functionality - which today we drop into our environment as a few lines of code and configure with a click - was more often than not laboriously crafted one gate at a time from discrete digital components, each with their own timing and power issues. IDEs, if they existed,  were not available to most companies for cost reasons - machine code or HEX being the usual route to  program and then debugging tools could cost more than a car. The amount of thought, stress, risk and brilliant inspiration required to do what had to be done back then was mind-bendingly difficult. In short, the profession - from my point of view at least - sucked. I loved the end results, I hated the process - most of all the arrival of prototypes. More than anything else, in the 70's and 80's I stood in awe of the people that trained me. There were far fewer EEs in the 70's, and most I came across were significantly more skilled than I am today - with all my software and tools. Today in contrast things are far more fun,  quicker, lower in cost and overall it is so much easier to accomplish  what we want to do.  One of the problems in todays design world is that producing a product that only marginally works is somewhat easier than it was 40 years ago. Because today we can jump from an input to an output so very rapidly, we often neglect some of those hard-learned engineering 101's that our predecessors needed to live by... needed to live by because the tools they had to play with at the time - at best - were only just capable of doing what they required.  Today with our excellent  low-cost highly integrated application-specific Silicon,  ESD-accommodated silicon front-ends, noise floors falling away, power consumption falling away and high speed readily available we can get away with bending the rules more than they could in the past. Sometimes today that leads to us creating marginal designs from black boxes with internal workings we cannot see and systems that susceptible to faults that are difficult to locate and understand. The design rules in 1961 are the same as the rules today - we can all learn from looking at old schematics and PCBs - and a good first lesson would be how very lucky we are to have today's tools and systems available to us. Don't even get me started on placing a micro where three discrete components could have done the job at a better price and just as well. Don't get me started on adding shielding where good analogue design knowledge would have made a circuit bullet-proof. Today we do more, we think larger - our designs have greater scope and accomplish greater things, but those designs regularly  rest on a thinner and more unstable foundation. A client recently asked me to make a 20 microsecond timer (in a hurry) for a BOM cost of pennies. I had forgotten how to wire a quick 555 timer sometime in the late 90's - and my quickest route that day was a 40 cent micro. Doing that in 1980 would have got me yelled at for days and days - and why - because doing so lacks thought. The devil is in the details.

[cmdstraker]

I just love your rants, Dave. You should record more of these. And yes, guys with Claudio's attitude end up putting the signal lines on their boards right next to a primary power input and wonder why the controller is basically throwing dice   

[rbarkoch]

Even if the design had changed you can still see the amazing engineering process these guys went through to build this stuff. Keep up the vintage tear downs, I look forward to them every time I log on.

[bfriesen]

Don't get discouraged Dave.  I LOVE your vintage teardowns.  Please keep them coming!

[anderslundgren]

I myself really enjoy these vintage teardowns more than the more modern ones since there is so much more evidence of all the hard work and the pride that has gone in to these older pieces of technology. They are also much better for instructional purposes since they often use discrete components which make the interactions between components much easier to understand for novices like me.
Keep up the good work Dave. And thank you for all your amazing and interesting videos. Best regards from Sweden.

[miket]

I appreciate your vintage tear downs, They're true works of art and its impressive to see the way engineers solved problems in a time before you could simply adjust your firmware. There is always something more that you can learn to add to your skill set, and to just dismiss something's merits because its 30 years old is nothing short of ignorant.

[WhitentonMike]

Dave, your rant button isn't a soft switch, it's a big ass clunking on/off switch tied directly to the mains. :)

[oldiron]

Dave

I learned the "basics" back in the early 1980's on 1950's vintage TUBE radars and tube analog computers. The knowledge gained learning and then working on those antique systems has served me very well up to the present day working on state of the art equipment. I would wager I could run circles around the majority of these kids who need to look up anode to see what it is.

[MYNICEEV]

Don't learn anything? MMM. How many vintage items around the world are still working? Now ask the question. How many modern things around the world have broken down after only 2 years or less service. I would rather pay £1000 for something that would last a lifetime. Than pay £200 a shot for something that breaks down after a few years. Google how many tons a year each person puts in landfill every year. Thanks for the rant man. You just keep those vintage tear downs coming.

[JoeDesbonnet]

Agree vintage teardowns are not just entertaining, but educational. What would be cool is to see a 30/40 year old product and the 21st century version of it side by side.

[harrymason]

I always learn something from your videos, Dave. Thanks for all the time
and effort to get it right! Much appreciated.

[TheMMray]

Being a weekend electrical engineering guy your bids of older kids really help because it is what I can build. Thank you

[quigonyt]

I agree Dave! There's nothing like a good old fashioned vintage teardown.
The old adage that sometimes they just don't build em' like they used to still applies.
I still have my Mitts M-VT0257, HS-U65 video related hardware which I worked on still use to this day.