Integrated electronics make us forget about them. Tiny packages with millions of transistors encapsulate so many functions so effectively that we don’t or can’t know what all they do. This is a boon to manufacturers since repairing anything is all but impossible. In the not-too-distant past, these functions or a small subset of them, had to be implemented in metal. Techmoan does a stellar job of rediscovering old technology. Prof. Bill Hammack of UIUC is also a master of this. Here he explains how the whiffletree mechanism enabled the IBM Selectric typewriter to work its magic. Beware – it is easy to lose a day watching his other videos and searching on the nuggets he finds.
Youtube Channel: Engineerguy