Engineering and Computers

[sciguy125]

After several experiences over the last few days, I've done some pondering. In the Digital Age, we have computers that help us every day. We can communicate with people around the globe. We can perform millions of tedious calculations in a matter of seconds. We can design and test an airplane before it's even built. So, my question is, how did people do any hardcore engineering without computers?

After having a short lecture about the operation and use of analog vs digital oscilloscopes yesterday, I was in awe of the added features in a digital scope. I'd never used a digital one before and there were so many time-saving gadets on it. For one thing, it gives numerical readouts of delays and various voltage settings. The thing that I thought was most interesting was the fact that it will freeze the display and shows the last displayable waveform if the trigger level is never reached. Try getting that from an analog scope. There's even a print feature to send a picture of the display, along with some info about settings, to a networked printer. (Although, my scope was one of the few that wasn't connected properly, so I couldn't print ) Apparently, there were even more useful things that were disabled because they want us to do it the old fashioned way.

Also take a look at CAD. You design something in 3-D, put all the pieces together and see that it all fits. Making 3-D drawings by hand is next to impossible. If you want to test fit everything, you'd either have to do some very careful number crunching, or take the time to build models. On the computer, you can start out in 3-D, do whatever you want with it, get the mass, find the volume... You're even a few clicks away from a CNC program if you have the right utilities. Wow, computers even eliminate the manual labor involved in making the part in the real world.

And now, how I spent a few hours of my Wednesday night. In our lab reports, we have to have hand drawn graphs. While Excel could easily take all my data, produce a neat little graph for me, and even fit a polynomial if needed, I have to do it by hand. On the last report, I lost some points because I should have plotted it on a logarithmic scale rather than the linar that my engineering paper has. Excel could have easily done this, but again, I had to do it by hand. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find logarithmic graph paper? Google turned up a bunch of stuff, but nothing that fit my exact needs in terms of scaling and borders. Eventually, I just settled for one that was close enough to what I wanted that I could work with it. During this process, I also had to figure out how to use the stuff. Plotting on semi-log paper is very strange to say the least. My graphs didn't turn out as pretty as I wanted them to be, but I guess they were good enough. Again, rather than having to go through this whole ordeal, I could have simply fed numbers to Excel and ordered it to spit out the exact graph I wanted.

I have more examples and I'd love to share them, but alas, my ranting time is up. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to follow the black pavment road to see the wonderful wizard of differential equations.