Analogue
In this episode, we explore the paradox that everything ‘digital’ is actually dependent on an analogue world…
All this hype and fuss and fancy noise about ‘everything is digital!’ A new shiny digital toy every day! - internet, web, smartphones, digital-TV, AI, ChatGPT, more, more, more! I can have a digital transformation, even a digital twin! Gosh! Wow! Wunderbar!
And yet there’s an oddity here: nothing ‘digital’ can ever actually stand on its own. (Unless we’re talking about literal ‘digital’, in the sense of ‘about digits’, about fingers. But that’s a separate story that we won’t need to go into here!) Instead, all that digital-stuff sits on top of things that are entirely physical, analogue. And without that analogue-stuff, the digital world would not, could not, in fact cannot exist.
The physics behind that electromechanical marvel that is the now somewhat-old-fashioned hard-drive. The complex chemistry behind the silicon-circuitry of a solid-state drive, or the processors and memory and more on which your smartphone apps will run. The cables or induction-aerials that collect the energy that goes into the chemical-battery that powers that smartphone or laptop-computer through which you’re reading this post. The incredible engineering that goes into the physical structure of the screen, with its flawless millions of tiny cells responding to swathes of signals far too fast for anyone to see. Digital sits on top of an analogue world.
Digital has to work with the analogue world, too - and that’s where it discovers that a lot of that analogue world is a lot more complex and messy and uncertain than digital might expect. Sure, working with digital is often a complicated, tangled, layer-upon-layer maze of this-doesn’t-quite-work-with-that; but in the end it still all comes down to mere ones and zeroes, a simple yes-or-no. But working with the real world is always analogue, and hard.
When I first started out in the print-trade, more than fifty years ago now, I learned how to work with metal type: tiny pieces of metal, all made to exact yet always slightly-different sizes, all assembled in rows inside a metal frame, all held together with complicated clamps. Heavy, yet fragile: if I didn’t set the clamps just right, the whole lot would fall out onto the floor in what we termed 'a ‘printer’s pie’, and I would then have to pick up each tiny piece with tweezers, sort them all into their proper places within the large wooden type-trays, and then start all over again. Maddening…
No wonder, then, that ten years later I went digital.
Within a year or two after that, I became one of the first people in the world to connect the then-new microcomputers to publishing-quality print. And I needed to, too, to get the best value out of that typesetting-machine that cost more than my house. You can see how it all worked in this clip from the 1983 BBC series ‘Making The Most Of The Micro’; in the video, the clip runs from 0:25 to 3:17, and the typesetting-machine itself can be seen from 2:45 to 3:02. As the presenter says, we could typeset a whole book with that system: in fact we’d do it in less than an hour, whilst even a skilled human typesetter doing it the old analogue way would take more than a week.
In the video, all the attention is on the digital bits; yet the roots of how it all worked were all in the analogue world, and those parts of the process were hard. The machine itself had to be kept in a darkroom, to protect the light-sensitive photo-paper; in turn, the paper was finicky to work with, and would jam the whole thing if we weren’t careful to set it up exactly straight. The photo-processor was even worse, with chemicals that stank, and with a nasty tendency to reduce a hundred pounds’ worth of photo-paper into a scrunched-up mess on the slightest mistake; it would leave horrid brown streaks across each expensive ten-foot-or-more strip of photo-paper if the feed-rollers weren’t taken out and cleaned fastidiously at least once a weeks.
Digital is easy; analogue is hard. And no way to escape the analogue part, either…
Things have moved on. That typesetting-machine took up most of a small room, and yes, literally cost more than my house. Forty years later, its counterpart sets on a side-table in the office, and cost less than a family’s shopping-bill at the supermarket.
And yet no matter how digital we go, the analogue part is always there, and always hard. The printer has to cope with different sizes of paper, types of paper, thicknesses and textures and quality of paper, all to each different nation’s subtly-different standards (or barely-standards, in some cases), all around the world. The paper itself can behave in different ways with different temperatures, different humidity. And yet somehow, each time, the printer must pick up exactly one sheet of paper, align it exactly with the feed-line, and keep it exactly straight and exactly flat all the way through the process until the output at the end. Analogue is hard…
Inside the printer, it has to pick up tiny pieces of black dust from the ink-cartridge, put them in exact places all across a line, and melt them onto and into the paper at exactly the right temperature. At a resolution of 1200 dots per inch, each space is barely 20 microns across; each dot must often be smaller than that. Ten thousand or more lines like that on every page, page after page, hour after hour, on and on. The digital part can be complicated, sure, yet still easy enough; but the analogue bit is always hard…
And the printer itself has to cope with all the vagaries of the analogue world. Wobbly power-supplies, in some places; temperature and humidity wandering up and down throughout the seasons, weeks, days, even minute by minute. Dust and insects and worse maybe crawling around inside, clogging up the works; tea and coffee too, if people aren’t careful. And yet throughout all of this complexity, this chaos, this ordinary, unnoticed, everyday device must somehow keep on going, keep on going. Somehow. The digital bit is simple enough, straightforward enough; but the analogue part is always hard…
The same is true for the underlying electronics, and for the making of that electronics, too: the digital part is (relatively) easy, the analogue part is always hard. The catch is that the digital part always looks so simple, that it’s all too easy to forget just how hard the whole thing really is; and the more we automate, hiding the analogue part behind the digital, we risk making it even harder than it already is.
Way back in my school days, again more than more fifty years ago now, there was an article in an electronics journal article titled ‘Should Ohm’s Law be repealed?’ Huh? What? You can’t ‘repeal’ Ohm’s Law, it’s fundamental to all electronics! Yet the point was a bit more subtle than that. Even back then, the calculations for Ohm’s Law and its ilk were beginning to be built into the CAD software for circuit-design: and students were becoming so reliant on that that they were failing to learn how the electronics actually worked, in terms of its underlying physics and chemistry and the like. The result was that whenever anything went wrong - as it inevitably would, in any iterative design-process - they wouldn’t be able to work out what had happened, or what to do to make it work again.
And without that understanding, they also couldn’t learn how to make circuits better. Sure, the automated system could design a circuit that should always work, according to its built-in rules and laws: but it would always be kind of clunky, wasteful, inefficient at best, with nothing like the kind of flair and elegance and subtle simplicity that an experienced engineer could bring to the story.
There’s only one way to gain that real experience: ditch the automation for a while, go to back to the basics and start again from scratch, working with real capacitors, resistors, transistors, logic-gates and more, connecting everything together with real wires and real solder on real circuit-boards, learning about those laws the hard way, making mistake after mistake and recovering from each. That analogue approach to learning is the only way that works: anything else is just a digital delusion…
The danger with the wrong kind of automation - the overly-‘helpful’ kind that makes everything seem so easy - that we forget just how hard it really is to get anything to work well in the real world, in a reliable, efficient, elegant, effective, sustainable way.
The rush to make everything as ‘digital’ as possible, and the over-focus on ‘digital’ itself, tends to gloss over the fact that all of it is built upon an analogue world - and that working in that complex, messy, always-a-bit-uncertain world will always remain hard. We forget that fact at our peril…