Powerful hardware.
Sunday, April 8th, 2018
I think one of the reasons I’ve been spending my creative energy (or what passes for it) lately on creating detailed, 3D views of thirty-five-year-old electronic design is that it always had a certain beauty and conveyed functional power.
Do modern user interfaces on our screens do the same? Mmmm…maybe not. And yet, buried within a dense, complex nest of menus and buttons, the pure utility of modern digital technology leaves all the old tech in the dust. It’s not even close.
In order to get one more layer into my late-70s/early 80s compositions, I had to patch and drag equipment from multiple control rooms together and then go through a laborious series of alignments and checks to make sure they were doing the right thing—that their analog signals were playing nice, in synchronization with the other dozen or so analog signals.
At two in the morning, this was a bit hit-or-miss.
But at two in the morning, the warm glow of those buttons and the chrome-y call of those fader bars sure made you want to do more with what you had.
Grass Valley Group 300 switcher, ©2018, John Christopher Burns
