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Issue #200 March 2007
Inside the Box Still Counts
by Steve Ciarcia
This was the title of my very first Circuit Cellar INK editorial 19 years ago. Two hundred issues later I still believe it. Like solder being my favorite programming language, I still believe that however appliance-like embedded control and personal computing implementations become, we can’t forget that the process of achieving that goal isn’t instant. In order to create the sophisticated devices and technologies regarded as off-the-shelf, many people still have to maintain real expertise in rudimentary design skills. Basically, somebody always has to know what’s inside the box.
Dave Tweed has done a wonderful job describing both the evolution in technology and Circuit Cellar’s editorial course during the last 200 issues. Ed Nisley has supplemented it with musings about how wild and wooly some of his projects have been. What is not touched upon is how we all got here in the first place.
Perhaps you’ve picked it up from my sarcastic editorial comments over the years, but in my opinion the phrase “engineering appreciation” is an oxymoron to most of the business world. They love us when it comes to conceptualizing and designing profitable products and then complain about the costs of maintaining the engineering department after it’s done. They love our geeky personality when it comes to working 16 hours a day to solve a design problem at the office, but they refer to us as “hackers” because we like to do the same stuff at home.
It’s no secret that I wrote a monthly hands-on design series at BYTE for 10 years before Circuit Cellar. The great success that BYTE and I shared was because we had a mutual appreciation of discovery and invention. Unfortunately, BYTE was insanely profitable. I say “unfortunately” because when you start having the revenue from 700-page issues, management gets addicted to the money. The result was that it only took a minor market fluctuation and they all started “tweaking” things to keep their “fix.” The biggest “tweak” was changing the entire editorial direction of the magazine from invention and design to “follow the bouncing PC.” Seeing PC Magazine make lots of money was too much for them and they decided to make BYTE into a PC Magazine clone. It didn’t mean an immediate end for me, but I saw the handwriting on the wall. Ultimately, I was given an opportunity to continue with the magazine, but only if I would review advertiser products instead of writing design articles. I’m sure you can understand my response to that.
I was already at a slow burn around that time, but the final straw for me was at a restaurant when I overheard someone at a nearby table describing how the PC was taking over the world and becoming a high-volume commodity and the embedded controller of the future. As I mentioned a long time ago, the point at which I almost jammed a piece of garlic chicken in the guy’s ear was when he said that businesses didn’t care what was in the box. The future was commodity computer users. All the rest of the engineers were just hackers (and not the good kind).
That was the last straw. It would be fun to say that I ran out of the restaurant and started a magazine that afternoon, but it actually took about a week. It would also be very egotistical of me to leave you with the impression that I started it alone. Circuit Cellar is and always has been a team effort. The people who started Circuit Cellar 200 issues ago were Ken Davidson, Ed Nisley, Jeff Bachiochi, Dan Rodrigues, Tom Cantrell, my wife Jeannette, and me. The important point to be made here is how things stand 19 years later. BYTE is gone now and just a dusty memory, but like the constancy of Circuit Cellar’s editorial direction for the last 19 years, every member of this original team is still involved with producing Circuit Cellar magazine today.
I look back at some of our early articles and smile at their simplicity, but that’s where everyone’s experience level was when we started. Today’s technology indeed seems more sophisticated, but it is really only the sophistication of the blocks we plug into a design and not the innate intelligence of the engineer that has changed. Blocks that were once just NAND and NOR gates have been replaced with integrated logic and programmable devices. Continually increasing the complexity and function of these design building blocks can only happen if there are people who know what’s already there and where we are going. To describe how Circuit Cellar fits into that equation, I choose to use the exact same words that I said 19 years ago:
Without a continuous effort at understanding and improving present achievements, we cannot progress to higher levels of achievement. Circuit Cellar is a publication designed to increase that awareness. We must not ignore the fact that it is a combination of people and machines that create intelligent personal systems. Whether they be applied as toaster-like appliances throughout an industry, serve as the control system of a CAT scanner, or function as a video arcade game, the basic ingredients of computers are similar. It is the continual evolution of a computer’s concept, design, and application that ultimately results in the perfection of the truly Intelligent Personal System.
Apparently, enough of you agree with this assessment that we’re still here 19 years later. Thank you.
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