My technical career started right here at New Smyrna Beach High School in Frank Skanga’s Physics and Chemistry classes.
Mr. Sganga had a unique way of making science fun and inspiring many of his students on to technical careers. To augment all of this my mother also encouraged to go into technology and even bought me the ultimate computing device, a Kueffel and Esser slide rule. With this “amazing instrument” I could multiply divide and raise arbitrary numbers to arbitrary powers with three- to four-place accuracy.
It really made my classmates jealous and intimidated.
I wrote an English paper that discussed the probability that we would be going to the moon. Mr. Sganga had to rescue me from the English teacher, Mrs. Dilzer, who thought I might need therapy from a psychiatrist.
When I graduated from technical school, the transistor was quickly replacing the vacuum tube. There were several years of transition in which engineers learned to perform all of the vacuum tube functions with transistors.
The transistor also saved a lot of physical pain because it was hard to go for more than a few hours without getting painfully zapped when working with vacuum tube circuits. Transistor circuits all use low voltage so you can put your hand on them with impunity.
The early transistors were made of germanium, cost $20 to $100 apiece and would burn out if you looked at them the wrong way. However, if used properly, transistors would last for 50,000 hours or more and use only a tiny fraction of the power of a vacuum tube.
Besides consuming lot of power, the vacuum tube lasted typically only 500 to 1,000 hours. This meant that the computers built with vacuum tube circuits required lots of power and required that people be employed to continually replace the tubes.
The first computers weighed tons, cost millions and had about the same compute capability as a first grader’s hand calculator. The first really reliable memory circuits required the space of a bread box to store a measly 1024 bits using magnetic cores.
For about 10 years, circuits were designed with individual transistors and complicated circuits had to be built in their entirety to see if they would work. The difficulty of making complicated transistor circuits work stemmed from the fact that the transistors varied greatly from one transistor to the next. Also the state of the art of design with transistors hadn’t fully evolved.
Very quickly, the transistors and diodes became very uniform and the prices of the individual transistors went from tens of dollars to ten cents or less typically. Moore’s law was being felt. Moore was a technical man who hypothesized that about every two years the amount of electronics you could buy for a given price would double. So far the law has held up for electronics.
As the devices improved and the ability to design circuitry improved, engineers were able to build electronics with a complication never before dreamed of. The systems could be reliably designed on paper without worrying as to whether or not they would work. T
The home computer came into common use in the 1970s. Having a home computer was and is like dying and going to heaven for an engineer.
It became an “erector set” with which he could simulate any system he could think up. The engineer could sit in his home and build systems on the computer that just a few decades before could not even be built.
It is amusing to note that in the 1950s, Popular Science magazine predicted that some time around the year 2000, home computers the size of a refrigerator and costing around $10,000 in 1950s money would become available to the public.
From an engineer's standpoint one remarkable change is that virtually any theoretically sound function that you can think up can be easily built with today’s electronics. In the 1950s and '60s you had to alter your designs to make sure you could afford to build them. For example, building a DC amplifier was very expensive and difficult so you designed your system so you would not need DC amplification.
The development of small size, huge capacity, dependable low cost memories has made it possible to do things that were unthinkable several decades ago.
For example, engineers have known theoretically for years how to do things such as data compression of TV pictures. However, it is just in the last few years that such things have been practical.
The pace of technical advancement is staggering. One interesting theoretical development in communications is the discovery of coding systems that allow us to reach the theoretical limits of data transmission. Moreover these coding systems can be economically produced with the electronics now available.
As Yogi Berra once said, predictions are difficult especially if they involve the future. Predictions about our technical future are extremely difficult to make. However, it is too irresistible not to try.
Technical change will accelerate. Moor’s law will continue to hold. Everything we can do now we will do much better and more cheaply in the future such as voice recognition. Just about anything that is theoretically feasible will eventually be done. That will include things that no one has even thought of yet.
Heaven knows how you will be getting your news. Maybe a talking hologram will appear over your breakfast plate. That's the prediction of my good friend Henry Frederick.
For engineers, the study of mathematics will be about the only part of their education that will never become obsolete. That includes calculus, differential equations, probability theory, linear algebra and vector spaces, complex variables and linear system theory. Mathematics that hasn’t even been invented yet will become important.
After graduation, the typical engineer will be working with things that didn’t even exist when he entered school.
One of the most frustrating things about the technical revolution for my generation is having to get a teenager or someone even younger to help with the Internet and some of the electronic gadgets.
How times have changed.