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Great story and audio! It's saddening to think how many such important treasures are rotting away forgotten on shelves (think the last scene of Indiana Hones, R
by Jun8 16y ago
Great story and audio! It's saddening to think how many such important treasures are rotting away forgotten on shelves (think the last scene of Indiana Hones, Raiders of the Lost Ark).
My other thought when I looked at the team photos in the article is: Engineers who can do this type of wizardry are always old, e.g. 50+ or more. I think in our current emphasis on software engineering, we have raised (myself included) generations of students who just doesn't have the same level of comfort with working with their hands on hardware.
- noonespecial 16y agoI think rather than pulleys, sprockets and photo-transistors, modern tinkerers would just feed the whole mess through a modern-day 35mm film digitizer (they're quite common) and then just use a little software to work out what the squiggles represent. Edit: A post appeared suggesting this very thing as I typed. I hate when that happens.
- ramchip 16y agoPerhaps older/retired engineers simply have more time and patience to put on hobby projects like this. I don't think there's such a large emphasis on software engineering; at least in the universities I've been to, software engineering is small compared to mechanical or electrical. There's also computer engineering, a fairly hardware-heavy program.