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> perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away

In traditional engineering, there's at least a BOM and manufacturing processes that create pressure to keep things simpler. If physical items were engineered like software, you'd have people bolting a keyboard onto the monitor chassis they're designing because they needed an 'on' button, and keyboards have buttons. Obviously they'd then also have to add in an always-on raspberry pi to plug the USB keyboard into and emit a GPIO signal when the button is pressed. You'd get a lot more complexity, but for most of it, "impressive" would be the wrong word.



That's a pretty insightful analogy!

Bolting an entire keyboard on to a monitor to add a single extra button...

Thankfully the cost of adding physical atoms prevents such outrageously dumb ideas.


The IBM S390 HMC (Hardware Management Console) is basically a thinkpad bolted on the massive S390 case.




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