As well, the beautiful vulnerability and realness, the imperfections, the notes sometimes slightly flat or sharp because of mechanical aberrations — they were wonderful to observe. The humming sounds of the windings, the realness of it. The tactile dots, the understanding of how they related to musical notes. What a thing it was to behold, an authenticity that the child in us could always appreciate and be impressed and moved by.
We're still in the wave of digital purity (and the VR/meta chapter won't help). Come back in 50 years for a reappreciation of analog, complex, fragile and non linear. By this time digital computing will probably be chaotic too.
Tangential to this thread, I listened to Carmacks keynote[0] for the Facebook Connect event, and it’s very refreshing to hear him push back, in ways that just make sense , instead of towing some corporate line that’s part fantasy and snake oil. See his comments on “social metaverse” and “3D vs flat screens”.
Digital computing at the server scale is already chaotic, since "complex systems operate in a degraded state". Personally I prefer deterministic systems over mysterious race conditions in concurrent code, so I mainly work in closed systems (desktop rather than cloud) with closed-form correctness criteria, and find and exterminate race conditions and unintended nondeterminism with prejudice (since I think heisenbugs are complex, fragile, nonlinear, and bad). And complexity and fragility is the enemy of self driving cars, and if you build systems that handle it inadequately, people die.
Aside from the practical reasons, I think unknowable unresolvable problems make me psychologically distressed.
> Aside from the practical reasons, I think unknowable unresolvable problems make me psychologically distressed.
I too, I'm wired to enjoy closed / defined systems. Yet, the few I've read about old EE books, is that the guys managed to analyse and comprehend noisy, irregular systems. Today mainstream computing is still about digital/clean/closed but one day I assume the analog/noisy/chaotic will become a thing in a normal curriculum. It's an easy/shallow prediction but still.
I mean some people are already getting nostalgic about CRTs for being so analog. And it's been what, only ~15 years since LCDs and other types of digital flat-panel displays started becoming cheap and widespread?
I'm part of that group (I ever regretted breaking my beloved mitsu diamondtron[0]) but still the mainstream is massively about digital purity, beyond biological retina sampling and displaying .. in that era good luck talking about the "value" of imperfect media, it's like fighting a tsunami to me.
[0] to cope, I scavenged a few portable TVs from the 90s to toy with the small tubes.
