As the "fossilocracy" (to steal the word from Dick Henry), we bemoan the fact that the young whippersnappers don't really
understand chromatography, but the point is that they don't have to (and chromatography would be much less useful if they had to). Here's an out-take from our "Fundamentals of LC" course:
The fact is that as any useful technology evolves and becomes more widely used, it becomes increasingly “appliance like”. The technology makes fewer and fewer demands on the skills of the users. Imagine what it would be like to use a microwave oven if you had to be familiar with the application of the Helmholtz equation (not to mention the vibrational energy levels of water in foods!). As *users*, we don’t want to have to mess with all that – we want to be able to put in our bowl of soup and press “reheat”. Just as most users of microwave ovens are not physicists or electrical engineers, so most users of HPLC will not be chromatographers.
Perhaps the evolution of the PC is a better analogy (but the microwave oven makes for a cooler slide!). When I started using a personal computer in the late 70s -- first a Radio Shack TRS-80, and then an Apple II -- you had to understand things like memory addresses and I/O ports in order to do anything useful, and the number of computer users was tiny by today's standards (Between 1977 and 1981, Apple sold just over 40,000 units, per Wikipedia). Fast forward a few decades, and Apple sold over 18 million Macs in 2016. Forgetting social media and personal use to focus on the workplace, there are huge numbers of PCs in use -- as word processors, e-mail clients/servers, accounting systems, communications, even analytical instrument controllers -- and virtually none of the users know anything about how they work; they just work . . .
. . . until something goes wrong. And then they call IT (or tech support) to fix the problem. The IT people know/understand a lot about how those computers fit into the business, but they, in turn, are supported by a smaller number of developers. The Jonathan Swift quote comes to mind:
"
Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum."
You can map that same concept to laboratory instruments; it's like a mushroom:
I suspect that a lot of the "veterans" on the Forum like Steve, James, and I would be "tech support" or "developers" by that classification (and in a small organization, we might be
everything!).
To come back to my original slide, the problem is that while analytical instruments are evolving into appliances, they aren't there yet -- which is why us veterans (and this Forum) still serve a very necessary function.