As a child, my father would draw me pictures of steam locomotives (on which he had worked during the war as a machinist). The ones I liked best were the “streamlined” ones, where the nose looked like a bullet and the lines were all horizontal with no visible piping, injector pumps or incomprehensible valve linkages.
It was much later, as an adult, that I realized that underneath all that smoothness was just another steam locomotive – sheet metal “fairing” designed by famous industrial designers had been clamped over it to give the impression of newness. In fact, everything that counted – that made it run – was old. And the fairing got in the way of necessary maintenance.
In electronic design we are far less constrained by physical aspects of the product, and have vastly more degrees of freedom with which to work. Of course, the beholder has to be familiar with the technology, but when I design a product I strive to apply this principle so that other engineers will appreciate how I have done what I have done. It’s my way of saying, as Steve Jobs said – “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”.
When I first saw Steve Wozniak’s floppy disk control board I was shocked at how simple it was – “everybody knew” what a disk controller consisted of, but here was something much smaller, cleaner and clearly much less expensive. I deduced that Woz was doing much of its work in software, an approach that I had considered forbidden without thinking it through.
I drew back and resolved to stay clear of challenging Woz’ work – he knew how to apply the principle this slogan expresses better than I did.
