Black or white, could you get a job as a self-taught engineer today?
Yes, this is probably one of the better industries for that.
Jerry Lawson, a self-taught engineer, gave us video game cartridges
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Re: Jerry Lawson, a self-taught engineer, gave us video game cartridges
#12Re: Jerry Lawson, a self-taught engineer, gave us video game cartridges
#13Re: Jerry Lawson, a self-taught engineer, gave us video game cartridges
#14Black or white, could you get a job as a self-taught engineer today?
Are we talking about engineering or "software engineering"?. I'm a "software engineer", and what I actually do is web development, completely self taught. There are about a million ways you could teach yourself the skillset that I have. I don't see how that compares to something like nuclear engineering or chemical engineering. No one teaches themselves to build nuclear reactors, and no one is going to get a job in t…
i'm not sure i get your point. are you trying to suggest that chemical engineering cannot be self-taught? or that self-taught chemical engineers cannot get work? either point seems suspect.
"No one teaches themselves to build nuclear reactors, and no one is going to get a job in that field as an autodidact unless they have already worked in a closely related field."
can you substantiate either of these claims?
Re: Jerry Lawson, a self-taught engineer, gave us video game cartridges
#15Black or white, could you get a job as a self-taught engineer today?
Are we talking about engineering or "software engineering"?. I'm a "software engineer", and what I actually do is web development, completely self taught. There are about a million ways you could teach yourself the skillset that I have. I don't see how that compares to something like nuclear engineering or chemical engineering. No one teaches themselves to build nuclear reactors, and no one is going to get a job in t…
He did so much physical construction of electronics that I assumed they meant he was a "real" engineer.
Re: Jerry Lawson, a self-taught engineer, gave us video game cartridges
#16I think like most people, when I think of cartridges I think of Nintendo. I always wondered why they hung onto cartridges for as long as they did. One advantage of cartridges over discs is that you can put specialized chips on the carts that each game can take advantage of. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_NES_enhancement_c... At the bottom of the above link you'll see a list of super Nintendo games that us…
That and, until the CD-ROM came along, what were your options, floppy disks? (Yes, I know that the Famicom had a floppy drive and that there were piracy decks for other systems to load from disk. And they sucked.) Also, the first CD-ROM devices were 1x and were very slow to load games. It definitely felt like a step backward in many ways, and in fact this is the claimed reason that Nintendo went with cartridges for the N64.
Re: Jerry Lawson, a self-taught engineer, gave us video game cartridges
#17I still to this day don't understand why blowing on the cartridges would make them work. It boggles my mind every time I think back to my childhood.
Simple. Hair and dust get to cover the electrical contacts of the cartridges. Blowing removes it.
Actually it had to do with the moisture of your breath bridging the connection between the carteidge and the system, however the moisture from your breath also caused problems for the copper in the cartdridge.
Re: Jerry Lawson, a self-taught engineer, gave us video game cartridges
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Simple. Hair and dust get to cover the electrical contacts of the cartridges. Blowing removes it.
Actually it had to do with the moisture of your breath bridging the connection between the carteidge and the system, however the moisture from your breath also caused problems for the copper in the cartdridge.
Wouldn't the game stop working as soon as the moisture evaporated if that was true?
Re: Jerry Lawson, a self-taught engineer, gave us video game cartridges
#19I think like most people, when I think of cartridges I think of Nintendo. I always wondered why they hung onto cartridges for as long as they did. One advantage of cartridges over discs is that you can put specialized chips on the carts that each game can take advantage of. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_NES_enhancement_c... At the bottom of the above link you'll see a list of super Nintendo games that us…
> 2) these chips were cheap
I don't think it's was so much that the chips were that cheap (chips are definitely way cheaper now - $5 for a wifi chipset?!), but rather the games were very expensive - when the game costs $100 or more in today's money (and you hadn't already blown your budget on a development team of hundreds of artists), you can justify a $2-$5 budget for an advanced chipset that'll double your sales.
Re: Jerry Lawson, a self-taught engineer, gave us video game cartridges
#20THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE INVENTION OF THE GAME CARTRIDGE:
http://www.fastcompany.com/3040889/the-untold-story-of-the-i...