Back in college, going for my BSEE degree, the professor or lab assistant were constantly stressing the need to record everything done at the bench in a log boo

Back in college, going for my BSEE degree, the professor or lab assistant were constantly stressing the need to record everything done at the bench in a log book with pages dated and signed. Part of this was to keep a history of lab experiments and remind you of what you did and/or learned. Really, however, it was to develop the habit to carry over into your professional career. There are many examples of this but the most important one I remember is the notebook kept by John Bardeen of Bell Labs wherein he recorded the path taken to invent the transistor along with Shockley and Brattain. Not only did it win credit and and patent for its invention, it also won him the Nobel Prize. All because they could conclusively prove their invention along with the when of its discovery.