There's a scene in "That 70's Show" where Kelso and Red bond over Pong and decide to mod the game to make it harder. And a few hours later with a soldering iron, smaller paddles!
The first time I saw that episode was at a friend's house. I felt so smart telling him that was impossible because you can't mod software with a soldering iron. Then his dad poked his head out from the kitchen and told me Pong didn't have software.
Turns out the only impossible part of that episode is the idea of it taking a few hours. Changing the paddle size was a mod already supported by the hardware and the manual gave details on how to do it. Though it wasn't necessarily intended as a difficulty setting, it was intended to support different sizes of TVs. iirc, all you need to do is solder 1 jumper.
I imagine this is how some sci-fi technology works. Certainly looks like a more low-tech version of some of it: Star Trek has both isolinear chips [0] in Federation technology and isolinear rods [1] in Cardassian technology that can be rearranged to change ship systems and Stargate has control crystals of various designs used similarly [2][3][4].
Mind blowing; both ways I guess. I’d like a tv show where someone building this gets to interview a time traveller from the 2020s and the latter knows nothing useful about hardware but can provide many unhelpful details about having GBs of storage, or things like DRM, pentalobe screws or electron framework.
I’m old enough to remember when there were some devices with schematics included inside or when you could order a complete service manual from parts vendors. Nowadays I’m happy to find replacement parts and if there’s no code inside them.
There was a downplayed running joke where Kelso was actually extremely skilled at engineering. In another episode, he repairs a car with Red and explains what he’s doing in high technical detail while Red just pretends to know what he’s talking about because he doesn’t want to admit that Kelso is smarter than him at something.
About 25 years ago! I was helping a friend/client look for something in his basement store room. He pulled out a huge multi-page schematic and said "look at this." It turned out to be the controller for a medical device he had designed in the early 70's. All discrete logic, no CPU at all. Blew my mind.
?file=Data_configures_isolinear_chips.jpg){kind=link}
The first time I saw that episode was at a friend's house. I felt so smart telling him that was impossible because you can't mod software with a soldering iron. Then his dad poked his head out from the kitchen and told me Pong didn't have software.
Turns out the only impossible part of that episode is the idea of it taking a few hours. Changing the paddle size was a mod already supported by the hardware and the manual gave details on how to do it. Though it wasn't necessarily intended as a difficulty setting, it was intended to support different sizes of TVs. iirc, all you need to do is solder 1 jumper.