alt Hacker NewsEverytime I read articles like that, I envy the engineers that worked in development of such tools. First microprocessors in jet fighters, electromechanical celestial navigation...
And here I am fighting gitlab pipelines.
Replies
It's a shame the only way to work on problems like these (and make a decent living) is to make tools of war.
The end game of much of silicon valley seems to be government (read: military) contracts. Probably because its the main branch of government that's thoroughly funded
> First microprocessors in jet fighters
Don't get me started on that...
I’m with you. The complexity yet simplicity of these mechanical devices is fascinating.
Nothing is stopping us.
One life to experience the universe. Save up for a sabbatical. Find new engineering pastures.
It's always rose colored looking back. Not everybody got to work on this. Some people were storming the beaches...
Eh, it's easy to get caught by the romanticism of working on things like this, but I assure you besides like 4 people in charge of the big picture, everybody else is dealing with things which are exactly as mundane as things these days. Like putting it through 1000 heat cycles of -40 to 200 degrees and then vibrating it at 2gs for 200 hours and then measuring the tolerances of each part... or being in charge of three lines in a standards document for 2 years negotiating the details with the DoD.
I think the opposite. Hardware is hard, as they say. Building such complex electromechanical designs to military specs without modern CAD tools must have been the equivalent of writing code in binary, without high level languages or even assembler.