Light-foot

I've been busy this week, down amongst the nanoseconds* measuring signal timings with a new oscilloscope. 

I've seen so much change in my working lifetime since I first wielded a soldering iron for money in 1968. In those days half the measuring equipment used valves (or tubes if you prefer) and everything needed half an hour to "warm up" before it could be used. Transistors and chips were the new wave, no-one designed with valves any more. The smallest transistor was the TO18 tin can package and the smallest resistor was 1/8th watt. The digital revolution was just around the corner, and the fastest signals I encountered were measured in microseconds.

Now everything is a thousand times faster (nS not uS), uses a thousandth of the power (mW not Watts), an hundred times smaller and a million times cleverer.

But after forty years I am still designing, soldering and measuring, it's just that everything around me has got smaller, even the signal timings.




*A Nanosecond is roughly a Light-Foot

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