[sdiy] SDIY vs RoHS

[Christopher Randall]

Man. I just re-subbed to this list after a 2-year absence, and I feel 
like I'm in the middle of a quilting circle and someone brought the 
wrong brand of yarn.

I have, in my mind's eye, a movie playing, wherein John Bardeen is on a 
listserve similar to this one, except it's c. 1949, so people are 
actually physically mailing punchcards to each other, because no one 
has yet had the free time to go ahead and invent the Internets. 
Anyways, Bardeen gets a stack of punchcards in his morning mail, drops 
them in his patented punchcard reader at Bell Labs, presses "go," then 
takes a jog down the hall to the teletype machine, which clatters out 
the following message:

____________________________________________

To: bardeen at bell.com
From: turing at nationalphysicallaboratory.ac.uk
Subject: What the hell are you trying to prove?

Dear John:

I hope you don't think you're going to score _another_ Nobel prize for 
shrinking my precious Valves, do you? Let me state from the outset that 
size isn't everything. We've built a massive infrastructure on vacuum 
tubes, and quite frankly, your tiny "transistor," as you so quaintly 
named it, is going to make our lives quite difficult indeed. I do wish 
you'd reconsider. With this turn of events, who knows what will happen? 
It's possible that computers could shrink to the size of a London cab, 
and then even smaller nation-states could own one! Then where would the 
world be, everyone calculating willy-nilly? And radios? Who on earth 
would want to have a radio that didn't also heat their house? On top of 
that, I'm getting old, and my eyes aren't what they once were. These 
"transistors" are definitely only for the steady of hand. No good. No 
damned good!

Sincerely,
Alan Turning

___________________________________________

Long story short, I don't want to suggest that the times, they are a 
changin' or anything, but seriously, it happens. It's the year 2005, 
and quite frankly, I'm surprised (and a little hurt) that I'm not 
outside working on my jet scooter.

Chris Randall

http://www.audiodamage.com
http://www.analogindustries.com
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