Out of Box Experience

March will mark the first anniversary since Jan and I moved into our new place. Jan is ordinarily a patient person, but recently she has been lobbying pretty heavily for me to do something about several of my still-unpacked boxes which I've come to view as part of the decor. I admit to being a pack rat. The boxes are full of important detritus carefully collected over many years, and though I don't need access to it much, it's comforting to know it's available. For those of you living in expansive suburban or rural dwellings, let me point out that storage can be a problem in the minuscule domiciles in San Francisco. Were that not so, my boxes would have long since been squirreled away.

Last week, in a fit of matrimonial assuagement, I went through the boxes with the goal of condensing their contents and moving the remainder out of sight. While sorting through the treasures, I found a receipt for a stereo system I bought in 1974. I am amazed at how expensive it was. Back in those days, vendors of audio equipment got premium prices for their products. Today, specs are much better, but prices are significantly lower, except for those arcane products that exist largely in rec.audio.

The time whereof I speak was before microprocessors ruled the earth. The value of a product was almost entirely in hardware. Industrial systems contained hard-wired controllers comprising hundreds of small- and medium-scale ICs. In those days it was a challenge to manufacture high-quality electronics products. All of those chips had to be wired together on the PCB, and every solder joint was a point of failure waiting to happen. Manual calibration and adjustment was a way of life.

Today's products contain fewer parts, use less power, offer more features, and cost less. What led to this happy state of affairs was learning to put more transistors on a single die, a feat which translates into reduced failure rates, power consumption, and manufacturing costs. Millions of transistors can be packed on a single die, compared to mere hundreds 20 years ago. Systems that once filled a box now reside on a single die, with room left over to swing a cat. This level of integration was predicted by an off-handed remark made in 1967 by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore. He said that the number of transistors in a given area of silicon would double every two years. That remark has been codified into what is now known as "Moore's Law."

Higher integration made possible the development of microprocessors and let engineers move functions from hardware to software, thus eliminating a lot of control hardware. As integration has increased, the software content has increased as well, leading to products with richer feature sets. We've reached a point where software is key to the success of a product.

However, the role software has played in the growth of the electronics industry seems almost to be taken for granted. The transistor is likened to the steam engine in historical importance at the same time that headlines about software bewail the "software crisis." Corresponding to Moore's Law describing the increase in hardware complexity, the increase in software complexity is characterized by observations like "software expands to fill all available memory." Ironically, Moore's Law is looked upon as a technological marvel, whereas its software equivalent is perceived as a problem perpetrated by troublesome, overreaching software engineers. There's your software crisis.

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