Electronics 1806

      Electronic devices are wonderful things these days. I remember when I first got into the science was in my early days in the navy. I went to Avionics fundamentals school in Millington, Tennessee. We were taught vacuum tube theory because that was 90% of all there was. We did 20 weeks of intensive study, with just 1 week of transistor theory. The instructor said not to bother with this because transistors will never replace vacuum tubes. Integrated circuits had just been invented for some components but was not yet used to create the monster circuits of today that make the world what it is. The first integrated circuits were single purpose devices with just 12-14 contacts. Now they do everything with as many as 256 contacts. Single components like capacitors or resistors were as big as one's pinky finger, now they are so small they are the size of a half of a single carrot shred. They are so small their values cannot be printed on them and I am talking about 10 years ago when I was still in the business. Everything these days is connected by slender traces on a circuit board instead of actual wiring as they once were.Our light weight cellular phones of today would once have been too big to hold up to our ears.
      Our world today is shaped by electronic devices and the progress in miniaturization of electronics. I just have to wonder what my early electronics instructor for transistors is thinking today? 38 years ago IBM was making integrated circuits that worked with 1 micron (1 millionth of a meter) traces on them. I cannot imagine what they are doing today, but I am happy with the way things are today, I am writing this on a computer today that is as powerful as one that used to fill an entire room and weighed at least a ton or more, while my computer weighs 2.6 pounds. Technology is a wonderful thing for us.
      That is as long as we don't mind the invasion of privacy. Everything we do on line is collected, sorted and sold. I look at something on Amazon and the next time I am on Facebook there is an advertisement for whatever I looked at on Amazon. If I go back on Amazon days or weeks later they have everything I looked at even months ago to remind me that maybe today is the day I want to buy it. If I look at a car on Car Gurus, I know I'll see that model car show up on Facebook ads. Be careful what you look at on line, if you know what I mean.