On Thu, Jul 20, 2017 at 8:04 AM, Doug <dmcgarr...@optonline.net> wrote: > > On 07/19/2017 05:44 PM, Joel Rees wrote: >> >> >> This is another aspect of "closed source" gratis technology that is >> often swept under the rug. >> >> It used to be, for instance, that a TV in the US had a full diagram >> of working parts in the back case, so that the TV could still be >> fixed even if the manufacturer suddenly wiped their books and >> disappeared. >> >> > Not at all true! As a sideline I was a TV serviceman in the 1960s. > There usually was a drawing of the tube numbers and positions
Thus, the working parts. Except it was not just the tubes, it usually included whatever an independent technician could get as a "part". > somewhere in the set--more usually on an inside surface of the > wooden box. Yeah, in the back [of the] case. :-/ > There certainly was no schematic diagram. What do you call a schematic diagram, then? > However, it was almost always possible to obtain real service > information including schematic diagrams of the circuits from > a paid service, SAMS was one of the services which provide more detailed schematic diagrams. Their existence owe no small debt to the fact that "intellectual property" rights of inventors of usually-not-all-that-new art were not allowed by the law then to take precedence over the rights of the inventors of prior art, nor of the community that gives birth to art over the existing state-of-the-art. And there's another word whose legal definition seems to have changed: state-of-the-art seems to now mean to lawyers something it cannot logically mean to those who practice the art. Too many salescrew-turned-lawyers, maybe. > the name of which escapes me now. (The pages > always included useless ones for record players and such that > nobody ever heard of!) Funny. I often used those useless diagrams for record players that I guess you never heard of. Maybe it was because I used them in the seventies, not the sixties? ;-) For those who are missing the allegories, source code is somewhat the parallel of those diagrams, and we don't have them now except in very rare cases. And, where those diagrams kept still-usable electronics out of the landfill for a few more years, lack of the source code results in a lot of waste in the current economy, contributing to pollution and other things that don't, ultimately, help the economy. -- Joel Rees One of these days I'll get someone to pay me to design a language that combines the best of Forth and C. Then I'll be able to leap wide instruction sets with a single #ifdef, run faster than a speeding infinite loop with a #define, and stop all integer size bugs with my bare cast. http://defining-computers.blogspot.com/2017/06/reinventing-computers.html More of my delusions: http://reiisi.blogspot.com/2017/05/do-not-pay-modern-danegeld-ransomware.html http://reiisi.blogspot.jp/p/novels-i-am-writing.html
