That happened to my Dad. He spent $800 replacing various parts he knew he needed to eventually replace. The check engine light didn't go away. He took it into the shop, they ran the diagnostics, and it turned out to be a blown resistor inside a $35 component.

Later he gave me his car. When the check engine came on, I took it down to the shop. They replaced the battery, ignition switch and vacuum hose. My Dad paid the $900 since these were "pre-existing conditions" that he should have fixed. I think I finally got all the bugs out of this car. Haven't had any major problems since then.

You mean the Turing test in the sex ed class? Boys who plug their joystick into an electrical outlet should automatically fail.

Then again I thought the iPad could benefit greatly from a stylus, just because of it's sheer size and annotating pages with a pen is easier than typing, but, that's just my POV.

Want to take notes on an iPad? Here's your stylus

All I need now - besides an iPad - is an external U.S. Robotics 2400 baud modem to access all those old school BBSes that are still around. :P

Put in 01/01/01 (that's 1901). Maybe someone will read the logs and figure out that there's a huge market of 109-years-old who surf the internet and play violent video games on mobile devices.

Don't bother. Just a bunch of BS artists hiring whiz kids to find a pony in a pile of manure. Won't smell pretty if they do find the pony.

"Solid State" (TM) always struck me as a marketing term back then. I also thought "solid" meant you couldn't take the cover off to mess around inside the TV. If you can't look inside the box, who knows what was going on inside. I didn't pick up on electronic theory until I got into college. By the mid-1990s, DIY electronic repair was on the way out and the local community colleges in Silicon Valley cut their electronic programs to nothing.

Yes and no. I used "electronics" when I meant "TVs". My family didn't get a solid state TV until 1977 and the vacuum tube TVs we had back then weren't retired until the 1990s.

Got a problem with Socratic method of learning? Not like anyone is asking you to drink a cup of poison.

The tech boom of the 70s-90s came about after the IBM priesthood for the mainframes died out by smaller computers that require less maintenance. As for why there's no more tech boom now, there's no money in computers anymore. College graduates for the last ten years have been chancing after health care to make the big bucks.