Thus a modern Windows computer or a Mac is a legally locked black box that you pay for and somehow agree to own without owning it in full.

Even back in the analog day, it was a top priority among manufacturers to patent their technology if at all possible and, in this sense, even the hobbyist was legally restricted by such patents. Patents, though, do not hide the technology but only restrict what you can do with it. You could learn away to your heart's content as you took it apart and tinkered with it. That is the nature of an analog world: you can put your hands on and physically inspect and manipulate real-world objects that in themselves constitute the heart of the technical innovation.

Reverse engineering prohibitions really came about as leading forms of technology began to consist more and more of proprietary software consisting ultimately of source code with binary implementations. The law accorded copyright protection to such code as soon as it took a fixed form of expression and prevented others from either literally copying it or paraphrasing it in ways that copied its substance while making minor variations. Those who had invested major effort to develop the code went one step further to protect it, however, because the binary implementations would be released to the public generally, leaving them open to inspection by any technically savvy person who might reverse engineer the product. Thus were born the modern forms of license agreement by which such software was licensed only (not sold) and by which licensees became bound by contract not to reverse engineer the software. Legally, then, one could no longer "tinker" with a product insofar as it contained such software, though nothing would stop anyone in practice from doing so (he just couldn't legally use what he discovered through reverse engineering). This reverse-engineering prohibition, by the way, has nothing to do with copyright restrictions; rather, it is designed to plug a loophole in trade secret law by which courts had ruled that software that is otherwise protected by trade-secret becomes publicly available (and hence is no longer treated as a trade secret) if it can be legitimately reverse engineered - because of such rulings, software vendors in essence said to the world, "if you license our products, you agree that you can't peek into our world of trade secrets by reverse engineering our code."

These legal changes came about to protect what early software vendors perceived to be their vital interests in guarding their proprietary advantage gained through investing their development dollars and are a default part of the landscape today.

In my view, though, it is not so much the legal barriers as it is practical factors that have turned the products of today more and more into black boxes. Leading technology today is much less analog and much more digital and the tiniest of contraptions today can contain mountains of sophisticated technological development in the most miniaturized of forms. Who, sitting in a garage, has any hope of figuring it all out in the sense of opening up the box and analyzing it without the aid of sophisticated tools that no average person can even begin to afford, much less without the aid of technical know-how that is far beyond the reach of even the average technically-savvy person?

Even when it comes to earlier forms of software, again, back in the day, many of the engineers I represented came out of the old mainframe environment and were quite technically savvy in working with miniscule resource levels by coding in assembly languages, etc. They worked much more closely with the physical machine resources than is either needed or desired today. As technology has developed over the years, however, the working level of knowledge has become more and more "abstracted" to the point where interactions with the machine-level functions are now a specialized niche with which fewer and fewer people are even concerned, much less proficient in dealing with.

So the black box is there owing to primarily practical factors relating to technological development. The Steve Jobs's of the world (or their contemporaries) might have learned from their Heathkits, but that day is gone forever. It is all too complex now at the leading edge of technological change.