Posted on 12/21/2023 9:54:02 AM PST by ShadowAce
The Toaster
Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. “What do you think this is?”
One advisor, an engineer, answered first. “It is a toaster,” he said. The king asked, “How would you design an embedded computer for it?” The engineer replied, “Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantizes its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I’ll show you a working prototype.”
The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, “Toasters don’t just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don’t look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years.”
“With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods. Specialize this class into subclasses: grains, pork, and poultry. The specialization process should be repeated with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes, and waffles; pork divided into sausage, links, and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs, hard-boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelet classes.”
“...The ham and cheese omelet class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy, and poultry classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance. At run time, the program must create the proper object and send a message to the object that says, ‘Cook yourself.’ The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled eggs.”
“Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don’t want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required, too.”
“We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility, and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won’t buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface. Users will want to pull down a menu and click on the foods they want to cook.”
“Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An Intel 80386 with 8MB of memory, a 30MB hard disk, and a VGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multitasking, object oriented language that supports multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a snap. (Imagine the difficulty we would have had if we had foolishly allowed a hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a four-bit microcontroller!).”
The king wisely had the computer scientist beheaded, and they all lived happily ever after.
If it ain’t broke don’t try to fix it.
My toaster oven crapped out last night (true story) - less than a month after I finally got the clock working right. It figured now it’s a clock is my working hypothesis.
+1 000 000 !
That’s what today’s car has become.
I recently bought a plain old 2-slice toaster, and it stinks. I have a 4-slice one in storage that works excellently, but I thought it took up too much space; so I bought a cheap little one that had ‘excellent reviews’.
A cheap toaster never makes sense; if anyone needs one, buy a more expensive one.
Cute, but a little dated. You would now need an i7 with 16GB of RAM and a half terabyte of local storage plus a cloud service to provide a permanent photographic record of your breakfasts. But you could save on the heating elements by running Windows 11 and use the processor to heat the bread directly.
Of course, no true software engineer would have failed to include a requirement for dual factor authentication as part of the user interface.
> "...Intel 80386 with 8MB of memory, a 30MB hard disk, and a VGA monitor..."
Clearly this joke has been around for decades. LOL
My toaster was made in the 1940s.
If you look at the plug end, you can see the wires attached to the prongs with screws.
I may have to take that advice. I have a newer toaster oven in storage (going to retrieve it in a few minutes) and I’m hoping I won’t need a degree in electrical engineering to run it. I don’t think cooking Pop Tarts on my wood stove is going to work out.
Old toaster usually have a bottom that opens to dump out accumulated crumbs and junk.
Maybe even an old Lego your kid dropped in years ago.
The cheap one I got burns or barely toasts the bread - on the same setting. It’s like it moves around internally, somehow.
Nothing is the quality things used to be; but spend money on something like this. The good one I got is a Black and Decker; it doesn’t look available anymore but it was about $65 a few years ago, and they have other models.
The modern ones usually have that too; every one I’ve bought has a slide-out bottom/door.
I have one of those. It doesn’t seem to work very well on an electric stove...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.