When I was a kid I would watch a TV show, or read a biography of someone I admired. There was a common theme: “I used to take things apart to see how they would work.”
Some said they put them back together. Others, not so much. So, I started taking things apart. Everything I was interested in seemed to be just a bunch of electronic components.
So that was a bust.
Or so I thought. x The truth is, even back then, software was starting to eat the world. It certainly helped me understand that electronics were important. All the things that I thought were interesting had electronics in them. I certainly made that connection.
I think at some point I learned to tell a capacitor from a resistor. But once there were integrated circuits involved, I was in the dark. I could tell a big chip from a little one. But that’s about as far as it went.
If I had access to The Internet back then, I’d have been able to look up those part numbers. That would have taught me some interesting things.
And so, I lament the lack of tools for answering curiosity about software. We have Scratch and some other things for plugging together code. That’s good. But we need some kid-friendly reverse engineering tools.
Hmmm… this is turning into a rambling rant.