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Yes, it was FUN. So many miss(ed) out on that because they only look(ed) at them as another means to an end. I can't properly express the joy of building an allophone based speech synthesizer laboriously point to point wired on a PC board for the Apple][+ bus and hearing it say "Hello Mahster" for the first time in an oddly Scottish inflected dialect. Let alone to appreciate all the brain sweat and time it took to do such things and now today treat everything like an appliance. I mean, how many understand squat about a car but the bare minimum required to drive it -let alone computers or microcontroller based anythings?
I fear, perhaps unfairly, that we're breeding generations of high technology users who are clueless about underlying principles or even manufacturing. I fear we, they, may one day find themselves in one of those dystopian futures where when things no longer function no one, or damned few, has a clue how to make them work. Or that our continued reliance on foreign production will eventually resort in our having few people in the US capable of actually manufacturing anything...
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