Simon Cee wrote:

Thats the biggest difference between the tech of my youth and now -
old stuff was understabndable to the average person.

I wonder if that's right, though. At one level, you can "understand"
how a reel-to-reel recorder works, but in reality you can dig deeper
and deeper into the technicalities until hardly anyone can understand
it. Just the design of the recording head might embody an entire
career's worth of R&D. And then you've got all the electronics - bias,
Dolby NR, equalisation, etc. Then there's the choice of materials -
plastics, metals, resin-bonded stuff - for the mechanics, the case, etc.

I think you can probably do much the same thing with an MP3 recorder.
You could "explain" and "understand" it in a sentence, or you can dig
deeper and deeper into the technicalities.

I guess the 19th century pioneers had to understand radio (for example)
at the physics level. Then in the early 20th century most people who
understood radio understood it at the component level. Now techies
might understand it at the module level. And so on.....

I suggest that almost everything is readily understandable at a
sufficiently high level of abstraction, and almost nothing is readily
understandable at a sufficiently deep level of detail.

--
SteveT