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I grew up in the Transistor Age. When I was a child in the 1970s, the great selling point for any electrical device was that it had no moving parts. The salesman would rattle off a series of bullet points and then pause for effect and intone “and this baby has No Moving Parts. Nothing to break, sir.”

This was an awfully attractive idea. When the fridge broke, or the 1967 MGB-GT, it was because some cotter pin or compressor or belt had failed. Life was a parade of blown gaskets, burnt electrical coils, snapped timing chains, and leaky valves. The promise of the new electronic age was that everything would just go on working, and we’d never repair anything again. Frequently, the marketing slogans would use the phrase “zero maintenance” or “nothing to fail!” as a sure closer.

The revolution is complete. Currently, everything has a microprocessor in it, and solid-state electronics are in all consumer products. Not only is my car run by circuit boards, but my refrigerator and my clock and the thermostat and almost everything else than ran on a spring or a valve or a chain drive is now completely electronic.

There are some results of this that we did not expect.

For one thing, everything is a computer and therefore unreliable. My phone “crashes”. My car is recalled because the logic in the processor is incorrect and the headlights turn off. The microwave shuts off because a bug in the embedded code does not allow the time to be 14;15. Complexity (the constant enemy of engineers) results in subtle problems that can’t be easily visualized. A task like shifting gears in a truck, which was once performed by metal plates controlled by wires pushed by a foot and a hand, is now carried out by possibly buggy computer code, so that second gear may not arrive because someone divided by zero.

And to make things even more trying, it’s very expensive. The promise of “no moving parts” was endless success. Since we haven’t achieved this, instead we have unrepairable mistakes. The car, which once could be fixed by a drunk with a ballpeen hammer in an hour, now requires an entire replacement of a $1000 “computer unit”. Airplanes with dangerously defective software require multi-million dollar recalls. And the oven that can’t handle time is not repairable; it must be tossed in the garbage and a new one bought.

The promise of digital technology followed an accelerated path to destruction similar to that of Communism. We were told that a new era dawned; that history had moved to a new state, free of the failures of the past; and that a near-perfect world had been inaugurated free of the outmoded mechanical chaos of the past.

Like workers freed of our chains, we would enjoy a trouble-free world of infallible digital machines that just worked, forever, without the need for metal-bending. Much like Communism, the no-moving-parts revolution was stained with human weakness. We can’t make perfect software, any more than we could make a perfect carburetor. The transistor revolution brought us errors at the speed of light and inexplicable mazes of complexity filled with terrifying minotaurs.

So while we rightly praise the digital revolution, with its instant banking and Internet communication and space-shrinking power, let’s not forget the humble moving part. With faulty humans we’ll always get faulty machines, but the clanky old cotter-pin and sawtooth machines can always be repaired with a bang and a curse and a twist, like the ‘67 MG. Like us, moving parts are forgiving.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 22nd, 2004 at 2:44 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.