That has always been a problem in electronic's, just blink and you are out of touch. These days they talk a lot about Raspery Pies, in my days that was something you had with custard. Sounds like you were in the industry when there was no surface mount components and we used a lot of discrete 14 pin DIL logic chips, TTL and CMOS. I started my interest in electronics with valves and then germanium transistors when things like the OC71 came out, how things have changed and then now everything is programable and to small to easily work with.
I started out with discrete components but was working for a silicon chip producer - admittedly, much of it DIL and quite a bit military grade. The chips were simple but the thought of having a 1000 transistors on something the size of a finger nail was revolutionary.
I then moved to a big American company who built production test equipment for the silicon chip industry. I was one of the applications engineers covering the European region. By definition we were always using today's technology to test tomorrows innovation and as quickly as possible. It was always stressful hard work. Over the next 25 years I went from working with simple silicon chips in commodity products through to state of the art RF, from two sided small PCB designs through to 32 layer boards several feet long, from testing a single silicon chip at a time to testing 256 of them in parallel, each with millions of transistors contained within them. Mind blowing stuff - especially for an aging hack like me. Trouble was, as time went on, I was no longer seduced by the technology. I'd much sooner be doing the marketing and strategy ... but that was almost impossible to get involved in with a remote field office.
During those years the cost of the production equipment, which was around a couple million dollars at the start, ended up being a thousand times more complex and about half the price. The test equipment business totally mirrored how silicon chips became more and more of a commodity industry. Same was true with how people rated engineers and their contribution. The technology involved really was a true reflection of Moore's law while the economics was a mirror of ruthless cost cutting.
In the end I was fed up with chasing technology and, having been a manager there at one time, being ordered around by people half my age and told to do great new things that I had pioneered while they were still at school! So I got out and don't miss it a single bit!
I like the technology still, but I have no wish to deal in bits, bytes, microvolts and nano seconds anymore.
There's something so much healthier about being retired, somewhat in touch with the natural environment, being able to go for a walk or a cycle ride and not having to get on an aeroplane at a moments notice and having to deal with a pile of sh&t that somebody else created!
