Comments
Unfortunately, the world seems to have had enough of experts and thinkers! Yes it sounds like hell on earth to me too! Everyone is just about making money now! It's a sad decline, I don't like the way the world is going!
Dr Andy Hill
2023-04-12 09:53:02 +0000 UTCI totally understand your description of the loss of "Think wild, think free then see the creative results" era. When people retire at work, after 40 years of service, I always go through all their old engineering folders and files they throw away. When I go back to the late 60s and all through the 70s, I find all kinds of conceptional designs of flight displays that provide truly imaginative alternatives to the "accepted" presentation of flight guidance cues pilots follow. This was all before CRTs in cockpits and computer graphics never came close to doing the bare minimum. Yet these carefully selected, enthusiastic and truly gifted engineers and Program Managers were given a certain amount of IR&D money with the goal of coming up with not only something new, but could be adapted to, enhance or even replace some type of flight guidance presentation. And this all had to be done with gears, meter movements, servo loops, geared differentials, synchros, and absolutely incredibly colored moving backgrounds mixed with guidance cues that made flying even easier in the days of electromechanical, money is no object, aerospace world. Some were even built as prototypes and demonstrated to potential customers. Some would progress into a fully developed product and some just sort of died on the vine due to the lack of customer interest. The BEST situation is when one of these "greybeards" hands me one of those incredible creations for my desk art. Many times the last known of a total of three ever made. Now it's all computer graphics, which is amazing and incredible by itself, but making things work on a virtual screen and making something someone can hold in their hand and see the creativity that went into that mechanical stuff interests me far beyond the computer achievements. Turn off the power and the mechanical indicator is still there. Preserving the ingenuity of those that had to make something physically out of nothing will always be my favorite era of R&D. Oh, and I found out why the fancy Agilent signal generator and digital Tektronix scope don't work well together in terms of amplitude. There is one button to push on a menu in the signal generator that brings everything back into the proper scales. I kind of found it by accident when trying to figure out I was getting the same problem on a known calibrated scope. I'll email you the procedure.
Matt Wietlispach
2023-04-12 03:48:49 +0000 UTCGreat video. You explained some history very clearly .
Brian Arbenz
2023-04-12 02:41:14 +0000 UTC
