[TML] Traveller Software: common file formats?

[Tom B]

On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 12:30 PM, Peter L. Berghold <peter at berghold.net>
wrote:

>
> I can also remember the day when building a microprocessor based project
> meant perfboard and wire wrap.  While you can still get away with that
> for some processors some of the more modern units with surface mount
> packages don't allow for that any more.  The bar keeps getting higher too.
>

*chuckle*

There probably aren't too many of us on the list who've built a system with
a microprocessor or microcontroller from scratch like that, using wirewrap
and discrete components. Nowadays, with all the surfacemount chips (even R,
L, and Cs) and wave soldering being a common assembly method, you just don't
build the same way. Prototyping has a lot higher bar too - you pretty much
might as well by a single board computer then worry about how to interface
your transducers, sensors, and other peripherals to it and not worry about
the basic computer. Or else you have to do the design and send it to someone
who can fab it using the surface mount technology.

ObTrav: I imagine if someone who had built a computer at TL-8 looked at a
TL-10 computer, they'd be mystified and wonder where all their familiar
components had went. Someone from TL-15 would wonder what the TL-10 folks
were talking about because a computer was a small (well, not so much in
Traveller... grin) box which just did everything and you didn't need to
monkey with it - programming was a conversation with the box. What is this
'building' thing? That's what your robot assembly line does, not so?

TomB
-- 
"Now, I go to spread happiness to the rest of the station. It is a terrible
responsibility but I have learned to live with it."
Londo, A Voice in the Wilderness, Part I

"To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like
administering medicine to the dead." -- Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine