How fast technology changes

[EngJW]

Just curious as to how much change in technology has changed in your careers. In my case,

1st year of college- we were using slide rules

3rd year- got an HP35 calculator, very expensive, but what a time saver

4th year- used Fortran on a huge mainframe. We had to punch IBM cards, and one mistake and you threw the card away

1st computer- Apple 2E

1st job- spent 2 years on the drawing board

1st cad- Computervision, they had to build a special climate controlled room, and the computer had its own room

Now- doing 3d modeling with Solidworks

I can't believe how much things have changed, and 30 years ago I could never have envisioned what we are doing today. It seems impossible to keep up with all of it and it is hard enough to stay current in your own job.

Anyone else think the same?

 

[IRstuff]

28.8, Ha!

try 0.11...

TTFN

 

[HgTX]

Yeah, I remember when 9600 baud was pretty cool. And some people still had 300-baud modems.

And I'm not that old.

I also remember BITNET.

Hg

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[TD2K]

There was a "Star Trek" program on the mainframe written
in BASIC. I thought it was neat that I had the program punched out on CARDS with the intent of playing the game on any mainframe computer I encountered in the future.
***************************************************

I found a PC version of that game as I also played it at UBC and on the computer at the first job I had. It was pretty close to what I remember.

 

[SWComposites]

Answer: the little bits punched out of a punchcard
Question: what are anti-holes

Was in the last classyear in college to use punchcards; 2nd year we moved up to DEC teletype terminals (wow!); by 4th year we were using interactive timesharing terminals connected to an IBM360 mainframe (amazing!). In first job had terminals with thermal paper printers on top to print what scrolled by the screen, and green phosphoresent Tektronic terminals to do graphics on (had to push a button to flash the screen to clear it before drawing the next plot, and push another button to make a copy of the screen on a thermal paper printer) - and we thought we were high tech! (just had to remember not to leave the prints out in the light or they would turn black in a couple of days). Sheesh, I describe this stuff to my kids and they think I'm nuts - they can't remember not being connected to the Internet.

 

[svanels]

I remember the dispair on the face of that nervous older student who tripped and all his 200+ cards were skating on the floor. Looked like he missed an important deadline. To make it worse, most of the punchers had defective printer lints. The ink was probably too expensive...

 

[EngJW]

Speaking of the internet, before that came along we had to use a search agency, I think it was NERAC or some name like that. What you would do is call one of their experts and describe what you were looking for. A week or so later you would get a huge printout of useless hits. Then you had to call back and narrow down the search and wait for another printout. It was useless for me because I knew of certain papers on the subjects and they did not even turn up in the search. My opinion of the internet is not all that high, but at least it is much faster.

 

[GregLocock]

9600 baud? We used to upload FEA models, via 300 baud acoustic couplers, to a bureau in Birmingham in the UK, who then ran them for us on their computer in the USA. I used to back my models up onto punched tape, which was quite funny, as it must have been a fire hazard in retrospect.

Now my basket case (400 MHz) computer at home can handle FEA models of quite reasonble size on free software, and has graphical pre and post processing instead of teletype.

Not that the accuracy of the models has improved...



Cheers

Greg Locock

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[m777182]

As a chemical engineer I have similar experiences as almost all of you: a TI57, HP67, Sharp1500, Sinclair QL,atari 1040 and so on but I am not impressed so much of the speed and amount of memory increase nor of the aboundacy of software. Do not forget that a great deal of math software was created in 50`s and that big software packages for chemical engineering are based on empirical equations that you can find in some really old papers.
I would like to point to some non chem. eng. or even non technical applications: as I help to my wife who works as a translator I am really amazed with the progress on the linguistic field: a typical application is a creation of a data base of all translations that a company has done. For each new sentence that has to be translated the program searches through the data base if it can find an identical string of characters that has been already translated and offers it as a solution. If it is not entirely identical the program still offers it as a starting point of your translation supposing that it should be corrected.
This way the actuall amount to be translated newly reduces to 10..30% of the whole text. Now, can you imagine this system applied to the chem. eng. work? To r&d work perhaps? Or to programming work? Beyond the discussion if it is possible or not (at the time beeing):Is it good or not?
m777182

 

[EngJW]

Ha! We had to read newspapers, study roadmaps, and write for literature. But then, you could go on vacation and the boss had no way of finding you.