FIRST 50 years ago / 50 years from now.

[TheBoulderite]

I'm also predicting that a town a team is from will tune into their regionals and cheer on their team. If the team does well, they will be welcomed home by a victory parade put on by the town.

Imagine the whole city of Cleveland, for example, celebrating 120's championship victory. That would be pretty cool. There may be some intense neighborhood rivalries in the same city, though. (For example, half of San Jose cheers on 254, while the other half cheers on 971.)

I'm also hoping sports bars will tune into regionals, DCMPs, and Champs when they're happening. That'd be fun.

[adciv]

In 2066 to accommodate the changes in gameplay and robots, the fields are now 27 by 54 by 81 meters. Teams will be complaining auto is too short and the 20 second teleop should be eliminated as most robots do nothing on the field due to the mandatory lack of any automation software during this period. The Great California Earthquake of 2045 devastated the California teams and the major nexus of elite teams are now located in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.

The Non-Newtonians’ (Team 49033) Gravity Lens has received massive complaints as being cheating and FIRST is considering banning any devices which affect the force of gravity. Prohibiting Morgan Gravitonics devices are also being considered. The rules are being adjusted to prohibit weighing any robots while the equipment is on. About half the teams struggle to accomplish the flying portion of the game and continue to use ground only robots.

Teams chafe at the 32 terabyte/s bandwidth limit as this reduced their holographic HUD robot POV interface. Teams are also clamoring for transitioning from magnesium air batteries to lighter weight higher output Minovsky reactors for powering the robots.

Additive manufacturing techniques have become common and some mentors complain we have lost the basics by not doing things the hard way by CNC. Material Advances in new alloys and composites have forced FIRST to reduce the weight limit to 80lb as otherwise the robots would be too large and too powerful. Teams complain about the limitation of motors that can only output 465 NM at 40k rpm.

[jajabinx124]

Originally Posted by marshall

Championships for everyone!

One championship for every continent! Except North America... poor North America having 2..

[Brian Maher]

Originally Posted by Whatever

This post reminded me of watching a video waaaay back when I was junior high about an engineering contest at MIT. So I googled away and found the video on you tube. It was broadcast on PBS in 1985. I think the members of this forum will find it interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9ijA4UBCQ0

I apologize if this video is well known on this forum but based on the number of views I am guessing not.

This is a really awesome video, thanks for sharing!

Even in the eighties, driver practice won competitions.

[techhelpbb]

Originally Posted by tjf

I was talking to some of 1257's students about science fiction literature and thought that, FIRST is a type of science fiction. 50 years ago this type of thing could only have been fiction and yet it is. If you were to explain to someone in 1966, 3 years before the moon landing, that teenagers would have the capability do build machines complicated as the work done at NASA, with some equation overlap?

The Jetson's boy Elroy: 1963.
Automations have existed long before that.

A large portion of radio and electronics were actually influenced by young people. There are examples of some of that with citations in places like the ARRL handbook.

Keep in mind that automobiles were well accessible to young people even before the 1960s.

My Father attended IBM school as part of vocational education before the age of 20 years old which was during the Vietnam conflict and before he was drafted.

My Father used to work on Sage radar defense systems:
https://www.ll.mit.edu/about/History...nsesystem.html

[tjf]

Originally Posted by techhelpbb

The Jetson's boy Elroy: 1963.
Automations have existed long before that.

A large portion of radio and electronics were actually influenced by young people. There are examples of some of that with citations in places like the ARRL handbook.

Keep in mind that automobiles were well accessible to young people even before the 1960s.

My Father attended IBM school as part of vocational education before the age of 20 years old which was duri g the Vietnam conflict and before he was drafted.

Though I understand where you're coming from, I meant in terms of computer technology combined with mechanics. The Apollo Guidance Computer, for example, ran at 2.048 MHz and had a memory size measured in words, not bytes.

And similarly along the automobile note.

I definitely should have explained myself better, but edit rules can make one forget.

Tim, KD2KRT.

[techhelpbb]

Originally Posted by tjf

Though I understand where you're coming from, I meant in terms of computer technology combined with mechanics. The Apollo Guidance Computer, for example, ran at 2.048 MHz and had a memory size measured in words, not bytes.

And similarly along the automobile note.

I definitely should have explained myself better, but edit rules can make one forget.

Tim, KD2KRT.

By the 1970s the PDP-11 was controlling automation in the Mark 1 nuclear reactors for GE (think Fukushima Daiichi). Till 2050 the PDP-11 will continue to provide that function in those reactors. DEC/Digital made something so stable it has outlived their engineers.

I occassionally get requests for support because my first computer was an $80k PDP-11 we bought for a project with IT&T. I am forty years old. My first computer was available to me by age 5.

So roughly a decade later is just a stones throw.

Plus there were R/C airplanes, cars, boats and I have magazines from the 1960s with model train controls made with vacuum tubes.

The actual foresight here is to see it get: smaller, faster, more accessible.

There are parts of the Sage defense computers that took up a city block that exist in the 80386 processor on a silicon chip in the 1990s.

I have always believed that the nuance that high school students can use this technology is not very factual. That age bracket has for a thousand or more years been the mark of the advancement of their generation. As it should be: they will soon be the adults with a world of issues and responsibilities. If we can send them to fight wars, we should expect them to rise to the challenge.

Where FIRST excels is giving opportunity to decades of students to demonstrate prowess without suggesting they simply are not ready to try.

[tjf]

Originally Posted by techhelpbb

By the 1970s the PDP-11 was controlling automation in the Mark 1 nuclear reactors for GE (think Fukushima Daiichi). Till 2050 the PDP-11 will continue to provide that function in those reactors. DEC/Digital made something so stable it has outlived their engineers.

I occassionally get requests for support because my first computer was an $80k PDP-11 we bought for a project with IT&T.

So roughly a decade later is just a stones throw.

Plus there were R/C airplanes, cars, boats and I have magazines from the 1960s with model train controls made with vacuum tubes.

The actual foresight here is to see it get smaller, faster, more accessible.

On that, I don't suppose I can argue. My whole goal of that hypothetical in the "50 years ago" was to ask whether the more easily accessible programming and technology would serve as more inspirational, and whether that theoretical trend would continue into the next 50.

However, you did prove very well that the tech was there. As an aside though, would a high-schooler have had access to the PDP-11 at that time? I was under the impression the PDP-11 in it's heyday was mostly sold to universities and companies, rarely high schools.

[techhelpbb]

Originally Posted by tjf

On that, I don't suppose I can argue. My whole goal of that hypothetical in the "50 years ago" was to ask whether the more easily accessible programming and technology would serve as more inspirational, and whether that theoretical trend would continue into the next 50.

However, you did prove very well that the tech was there. As an aside though, would a high-schooler have had access to the PDP-11 at that time? I was under the impression the PDP-11 in it's heyday was mostly sold to universities and companies, rarely high schools.

Missed my edit. I had access to the PDP-11 at the age of 5. My friend Justin's Father worked for Xerox he had access to an early WYSIWYG protoype by age 6.

You could go to IBM school while nearly high school age and I had friends with mainframe access at Universities over modems.

So while many schools may not have had physical hardware: even Sage used phone lines to close the gap between the hardware location and the user's location.

I grew up with my Dad sitting around with a stencil at his drawing board every night. Laying out delay lines and bit slice processors. After the Air Force he designed parts of Time Tran for IT&T Telex. Think e-mail.

There were many young interns. Lots of energy. Looking for opportunity.

[tjf]

Originally Posted by techhelpbb

Missed my edit. I had access to the PDP-11 at the age of 5. My friend Justin's Father worked for Xerox he had access to an early WYSIWYG protoype by age 6.

You could go to IBM school while nearly high school age and I had friends with mainframe access at Universities over modems.

So while many schools may not have had physical hardware: even Sage used phone lines to close the gap between the hardware location on the user.

Well, thanks for the explanation, and that's very interesting. Is there a chance your friend got to use the Xerox Alto?

[techhelpbb]

Originally Posted by tjf

Well, thanks for the explanation, and that's very interesting. Is there a chance your friend got to use the Xerox Alto?

What he had was a protype for something more advanced. It never left Xerox as a product. I suspect it was what Jobs and Gates saw on their tour that became the inspiration for the early Apples.

The folks at Xerox had hired a lot of the retiring Air Force talent with an eye for leveraging their experience. Basic graphics were very doable back then with special hardware on a standard CRT.

My Father had an offer from Xerox he did not want to move. So the kid from Brooklyn went back to NYC and 67 Broad Street:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITT_Corporation