A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible

Was it possible all the way down to the transistor level? Maybe not, but it didn't have to be in order to understand the behavior.

It was certainly possible down through the IC level, and there were any number of people who achieved that sort of mastery.

I don't believe that's still possible with any consumer general purpose computer. I think there are people out there with that level of understanding of specialized devices, probably up to and including things like Xbox and PS3. I don't know if there are people that understand an airbook to that level, or a desktop PC, or their webserver. Maybe, but it seems unlikely.

It all depends on how far into the system you want to look. How many users of the FAT file system actually learnt the innards of NTFS? How many programmers specialized on Borland IDEs rather than WatCom? There's not really that much more to learn these days if you want to just write software; understanding the entire system is a matter of jumping down the rabbit hole. If I understand how electron tunneling prevents processor architecture going much beyond the current state of the art, do I have a greater understanding of computers than someone who knows the OpenGL API backwards?

I think people are afraid to admit how often they Google search things.

I started teaching myself programming when I was 7. I am 34 now. There is plenty of stuff that I remember, but a lot more that I don't and I don't try to. And I find out about a new piece of software, service or whatever every day or every few days.

I am proud of the fact that I Google so much.

I think its actually more important and more useful to be able to Google things and quickly get the gist of a new thing (or look up some old syntax) and drill down into a solution than it is to know lots of stuff off the top of your head.

Mainly because there are so many tools, frameworks, programming languages coming out that if you don't Google first you will usually end up wasting a lot of time.

I think the main thing holding science and technology (including information technology of course) back right now is the limited ability to integrate knowledge and thought and its application. Google is the closest we have come to a solution to that problem.

But I think we may see something like a metasystem transition resulting in some higher-level integration and organization for knowledge, technology, and its application to problem solving. It could come through some kind of artificial general intelligence, or maybe just some type of advanced knowledge/semantic engineering/collaboration system. Or maybe high bandwidth brain-computer interfaces will allow brains to be networked and even integrated wirelessly.

To be honest, the "complete understanding" died way before the original post. It was the moment that they started building computers with integrated circuits inside them (before 1970) and complexity rocketed logarithmically. It died doubly so the moment that electrical engineering and the practical side of computer science diverged into "them" and "us".

If you want to use something which you understand, you will probably need to buy a crate of transistors, resistors and diodes and wirewrap yourself an entire computer from scratch PDP-7 style.

This fact is a warning: We really are building things with too deep abstraction hierarchies causing knowledge to be divided. One day we will never hope to comprehend anything in a lifetime.