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So, you want a simple digital logic function in a synthesizer. Maybe it's an AND gate, or a couple of XORs, maybe as much as a shift register. How will you build it?
Today it often makes sense to just throw in a microcontroller chip. They're cheap and versatile. The same microcontroller can be programmed to serve many different purposes, so you can keep just a few types of them in stock, buy them in huge quantities, and that keeps costs down. If you need more speed, then it may make sense to use FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays), but very few synthesizer circuits really need that much speed.
Twenty or thirty years ago, before microcontrollers were cheap, the usual way of doing a small amount of digital logic was to throw in a couple of MSI (medium-scale integration) logic chips, such as the 7400 or 74LS00 series based on bipolar transistors or the 4000 series based on CMOS. These were small logic building blocks, typically a few gates on each 14-pin or 16-pin DIP chip. There were dozens of popular chips in these series and a few hundred less-common ones. They first existed in the late 1960s but weren't cost-effective and readily available to hobbyists until the mid-1970s. Such chips still exist and you still see a lot of them in DIY designs, but they're gradually falling out of production as cheaper microcontrollers become more appealing to the large commercial interests that are most of the market.
Even further into the past, integrated circuits of any kind were too expensive to be the first choice for hobbyists, and we had to build things out of one active device (transistor or even tube) at a time. I used this kind of logic in my MSK 012 Transistor ADSR. Logic gates built with the minimum number of transistors are barely digital at all: they may be better understood as analog amplifier circuits that happen to be amplifying digital signals. The chips we usually use today, and the gates inside them, have become more complicated and involve more transistors as transistors have become cheaper, but they can be understood as just evolutionary developments from the simplest possible gates.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2020, @04:15PM (5 children)
Digital is just a special case of Analog, full stop. (and another phase from the days of "relays" giving a digital performance!)
100Mb Ethernet (digital) is actually just a 200Mhz wire (analog), that someone said the rule to translate is...
Even the simplest gate in the most complete CPIU is just another transistor structure with full biasing.
Image the REAL capacity as we change from 0 (also thought as 0V) and 1 (>0.7V) to any state. It is the "giift" of Quantum Computing, but it will take time to retrain EVERY ones thinking.
.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2020, @05:01PM (2 children)
Nothing special in sticking your fingers up your anus.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday June 22 2020, @05:36PM (1 child)
It is more special to stick your fingers in a light socket.
A heavy socket might even be better.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2020, @06:48PM
Not the same AC, but
In my case, won't do much but make my fingers slightly tingle, occasionally I'll get a small amount of fingers twitching as the nerves fire, but 240v mains, no problem (up to 32A, anyway).
I cut my teeth on repairing valve equipment from my early teens onwards, so 400-500V 'shocks', umm, weren't/aren't..TV repair, I'll admit the EHT stuff there got me good a couple of times.
Ah, now we're talking, for some reason I've never quite trusted 415v and up, especially when driven directly by a national grid, I've worked on live 3-phase systems (when I swore blind many years ago that I wouldn't) but the buggers scare me for some bloody reason..
Anyway, as some of us have freakishly high skin resistances, have an old one from the local shipyards which is bound to work as it sort of bypasses that..
'gaun pish on a live weldin' torch ya stupid cunt'
(There is an apocryphal story that goes with this, at least, I hope it's apocryphal, otherwise, ouch..what a stupid and painful way to go..)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2020, @06:57PM
When you change logic from 0 or 1 to the infinite number of numbers between 0 and 1... Where are you going to find a CPU for that?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday June 22 2020, @10:10PM
No, what you are describing is analogue computing. Quantum computing is a bit more complex.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.