My steel backplate original IBM Model M keyboard in use continuously from when it was new until today. I can't figure out any way to improve it.
Logitech trackman wheel from a decade or two ago, perfect to have a desk with 3 or 4 machines on. Must have thousands of hours of FPS and minecraft on it, feels new, feels perfect.
The original Radio Shack wire wrapping tool, you could pay up to 100x more for something less reliable or slower or harder to use but I built entire 8-bit microcomputers with mine. The wire stripper which is perfect for 30 gauge wire wrap wire stores inside the tool. You could pay more for something faster but less reliable or whatever bad engineering tradeoff, but somehow this cheap tool had the perfect engineering tradeoffs.
The hyper orthogonal PDP-11 assembly language instruction set. Essentially you wrote C in assembly. That and the 6809/68hc11 general family are the only two architectures I ever miss programming in assembly, everything else is perfectly doable but a chore.
I grew up with a surplus Tektronix 531 oscope, the kind with pluggable chassis. There's just something about tools designed by engineers specifically for engineers where everything just feels perfect and everything just worked. If it weren't for weighing a hundred pounds and drawing half a kilowatt every oscope would be a Tektronix 531.
Somehow I did electronics for over 30 years before buying a top of the line digital Hakko soldering station. I was so dumb, I should have invested in something of that quality level decades ago. Its perfectly repeatably capable of anything; after some flux cleaning I've had people ask if I own a wave soldering machine given a couple hundred perfect and identical joints on a board. Its weightless in my hand, perfect heating, ESD proof, and a joy to use. It cannot be improved.
> Somehow I did electronics for over 30 years before buying a top of the line digital Hakko soldering station.
I just got into Electronics and while buying some basic kit (cutters, wire, etc) I had to think hard about my soldering iron choice. I don't expect to solder a ton immediately as I'm still learning, but over time I may do it more. Thus, I was wondering whether to just pay out for a high quality iron, one I would never have to replace (or at least not soon).
I went with the Hakko. Bought some extra tips for the long run, and it's simply fantastic. Heats up incredibly fast, is very accurate, and easy to use. Sitting in my closet at the moment while I get a workbench eventually, but I eagerly have been using that thing every chance I get for the past several weeks. It's just fun to use and well designed.
I think the only thing the Hakko FXD could possibly improve is perhaps slightly improving the UX for preset temperature configuration. I'm not sure this feature even matters for anyone who isn't soldering constantly, though (I can basically get away with 750 every time).
Otherwise I agree, it almost seems perfect in every way.
It's possible that the only reason I care about RS going out of business is that I lost mine and want another. I don't do wire wrap any more, but the stripper that came with it made perfect strips on 30 gauge wire.
I'm not sure it would be viable. You need sharp edged sockets because the wire cold welds to the socket pin and if you unravel you can feel it pop loose from the corners. "Gas tight connection" as they called it. You can wrap round analog component pins but it doesn't stick as well. So you're mostly limited to digital DIP components in sockets. Given that limitation it worked very well back when "The TTL cookbook" from the late 70s was mostly contemporary.
Counter intuitively people assume short neat wiring is lower capacitance therefore better, actually complete rats nest has lower capacitance and lower coupling. You aren't going to be running much above maybe 20 MHz but that was OK in the days when a 2 MHz nmos Z80 was "pretty fast".
Everyone does something dumb once like wrap an entire 8-bit microprocessor system using the same wiring color, but back then it was easy to get multiple colors and do your data bus in green and address bus in red or whatever.
Another anecdote back in the old, old days original "TTL", no series like LS or HC, was kinda power hungry and 30 gauge wire is not thick and people would daisy chain from power pin to power pin and 20 hungry chips later be perturbed that 5 volts comes in but there's only 4 volts at the power pins of the last chip. Lots of people hand soldered larger gauge wire for power and ground along with hand soldering on decoupling capacitors.
Another anecdote from the ancient days WRT cross coupling and interference the electrical noise a circuit generates is almost solely proportional to risetime / falltime of gate which depends on gate family not clock speed. So a 10 MHz plain TTL board was much more electrically quiet than a 0.89 MHz "quarter colorburst crystal" circuit made with "F" family chips, this is very counter intuitive to many people.
What a color burst crystal is, and why they were so cheap until the 00s or so, is beyond the scope of this post LOL.
Nothing forces people to learn RF/analog electronics as well as trying to do fast digital electronics.
Logitech trackman wheel from a decade or two ago, perfect to have a desk with 3 or 4 machines on. Must have thousands of hours of FPS and minecraft on it, feels new, feels perfect.
The original Radio Shack wire wrapping tool, you could pay up to 100x more for something less reliable or slower or harder to use but I built entire 8-bit microcomputers with mine. The wire stripper which is perfect for 30 gauge wire wrap wire stores inside the tool. You could pay more for something faster but less reliable or whatever bad engineering tradeoff, but somehow this cheap tool had the perfect engineering tradeoffs.
The hyper orthogonal PDP-11 assembly language instruction set. Essentially you wrote C in assembly. That and the 6809/68hc11 general family are the only two architectures I ever miss programming in assembly, everything else is perfectly doable but a chore.
I grew up with a surplus Tektronix 531 oscope, the kind with pluggable chassis. There's just something about tools designed by engineers specifically for engineers where everything just feels perfect and everything just worked. If it weren't for weighing a hundred pounds and drawing half a kilowatt every oscope would be a Tektronix 531.
Somehow I did electronics for over 30 years before buying a top of the line digital Hakko soldering station. I was so dumb, I should have invested in something of that quality level decades ago. Its perfectly repeatably capable of anything; after some flux cleaning I've had people ask if I own a wave soldering machine given a couple hundred perfect and identical joints on a board. Its weightless in my hand, perfect heating, ESD proof, and a joy to use. It cannot be improved.