Of course, not everyone in the mechanical world agrees with that view. To many of them, electronics are still something foreign, not to be trusted.

Surprisingly, this view exists even in a market that seems to have adopted ICs in a big way, the automotive industry. But at the recent Society of Automotive Engineers conference in Detroit, Jeffrey J. Owens, general director of engineering at Delphi, said this about his customer base: "Some carmakers still consider cars a mechanical product, and electronics are just a necessary evil."

This reality check comes courtesy of someone who's a champion of electronic technology. That's because Delphi Automotive Systems, the now-independent spinout from General Motors, has been a leading light in automotive electronics ever since the electric starter was considered a high-tech invention. At one point, Delphi's headquarters in Kokomo, Ind., housed one of the largest semiconductor fab plants in the United States. Today, its arsenal includes heads-up displays, radar systems and many other technologies that rival those of any system maker.

Some in the automotive industry have been burned by electronics, so they're reluctant to try again. Ten years ago, such caution was fairly commonplace. But when a high-end car has close to 100 processors, and even the simplest has more than a handful, it seems that electronics are widely viewed as beneficial. And they are, in most cases. In the same breath with his "necessary evil" characterization, Owens said that other carmakers "have embraced electronics fully," and that the necessary-evil crowd was in the minority.

Still, his comments were an unexpected reminder that the real world is still analog and mechanical. It's doubtful that any amount of simulation, 3-D modeling or even aggressive marketing will alter this fact.

I've heard similar stories often . One industrial automation manager told of watching a manufacturing engineer warily eyeball a new piece of equipment that used fiber-optic cables, quite the novel scheme back in the mid-80s. The engineer on the factory floor checked out the cabling and looked at the connector a while. Then he pulled out his pliers, stripped the sheathing off the optical cable and twisted it around the connector, no doubt wondering why it had such an unusual contact.

The people who don't "embrace electronics fully" are going to become even more of a minority in the future. Still, it's sometimes a good thing to be reminded that maybe the products we spend so much time thinking about aren't the center of the universe for many people or many companies.