why aren't electronics schematics trade secrets?

oh but they ARE closely guarded.... ever tried finding schematics created by companies ? try for instance finding a schematic of any gsm (except in service manuals of course....)

and the hard part is also stringing them together thereby thinking further as just principles, about as hard as creating parts if you try to do it right

Anyone remember the days before VLSI took over (60's and 70's), when the manual for just about every electronic device included a wiring diagram? I remember seeing this in televisions, transistor radios, and even some early calculators.

At least 97% of the production use very common circuit solutions, usually copied directly from from the application notes from the manufacturer.

Just curious why electronics schematics aren't closely guarded trade secrets. Is it because the hard part is making the parts, not stringing them together?

Rich Grise wrote

They did it with monos too.

Your good health!

I disassembled several radio-gramophones when I was a child.

Big furniture floor types and slightly smaller desk models. Those radios usually had many shortwave bands, and anything from 1 to

What surprised me were the ingenious half-mechanical solutions which showed up in those radios.

One was using a piece of cottom string to pull a coil further away from another coil, changing the degree of magnetic coupling between them, probably changing the characteristics of a filter.

Another was a lever to move which moved a metal foil on top of another metal foil, a variable capacitor. Movable coil cores to change the inductance, etc..

Today we see very little of mechanical movement in machines, we hardly have real switches anymore, just plastic buttons which move half a millimeter. And all circuits which needed mechanical movement have been replaced with full-electronic variants.

The last to go in consumer electronics was the variable capacitor in radios.

The circuit is protected by Patents.

--- Yes, and the schematic is protected by copyright, so anyone who wants to copy the schematic or the circuit can't?

---

-- John Fields

because one can make the same FUNCTION with different component/schematics

component/schematics

Our mainframe computer used to have a microfiche reader with boxes of microfiche containing all the schematics of the boards and backplane, power supplies, disk drives, tape drives, etc. These were all marked trade secrets by the maker of the mainframe, and were only supposed to be read by the field techs.

So the answer to your question is that just because you don't believe that electronic schematics are closely guarded trade secrets does _not_ mean they don't exist. For the obvious reason, that trade secrets are meant to be just that: a secret. Duh.