On Sat, 9 Jan 2016 05:18:10 -0500, "Mr. Luddite"
wrote:

On 1/9/2016 2:11 AM, wrote:
On Fri, 8 Jan 2016 11:13:01 -0800, Califbill billnews wrote:

40 years ago I made a living fixing devices that operated with vacuum
tubes. Not much call for it now other than the occasional guitar amp. :-)




What replaced those jobs?

Nothing. The jobs are just gone because it is cheaper to cut open the
box and plug in a new one from China than to fix the old one.
I remember when there was a TV repair shop in every strip mall and now
TVs are "Bic lighters". If they break, you throw them away if they are
off warranty. If they are on warranty, they give you a new one.

Computers are the same way and really started being like that in the
80s. It is why I migrated from fixing hardware to fixing "processes".



It seems to me that early personal computers were rather quickly made
obsolete due to ever-increasing complexity of software programs released
for them, RAM requirements and hard drive storage space.
The Intel 8086/8088 processor gave way to the 286, 386, 486 and so on
with ever increasing hard drive space and RAM memory. Eventually it
seemed that processor speed and hard drive space began to have less of
an affect on what software they would run and computers stopped being
obsolete every couple of years.


Andy Grove and Bill Gates conspired years ago to make sure they made
software to drive PC sales and the increased PC speed drove fatter
software.
"What Grove giveth, Gates taketh away."
They still manage to add enough bloat to each new version of the
software to drive new PC sales and most people think something as
simple as a virus requires buying a new PC.
Now that we are at the end of Moore's Law the only way to beef up the
processors is to use a bunch of them.
The software writers are now requiring dual core machines to do
EXACTLY the same thing we used to do with slower single core machines
.... like Flash
I can drag out one of my 2gz P4 1g ram machines with XP and Flash 11
and watch Netflix just fine but if I load the latest version of Flash
I need a 2.5 gz dual core machine with 2g of ram to see the same show.
WTF?