2 ms·
The fact that they actually had to worry about the precision of drawings in addition to the actual device is amazing. It's such a foreign concept in the compute
by eternityforest 3y ago
The fact that they actually had to worry about the precision of drawings in addition to the actual device is amazing. It's such a foreign concept in the computer age, where you never want any information to be exclusively analog like that, you never want to directly rely on a steady hand, and drawings are just a UI on top of numbers and constraints.
I still think the Bendix is a bit outside the difficulty level of most modern tech work, but scribing lines on zinc sheets and decoding what's essentially UART without silicon is just insane. That's an amazing story right there!
- Animats 3y ago> UART without silicon Here's the actual serial data decoder, from when I was restoring a Teletype machine.[1] There's a short essay on mechanical design philosophy over there. > It's such a foreign concept in the computer age, where you never want any information to be exclusively analog like that, you never want to directly rely on a steady hand, and drawings are just a UI on top of numbers and constraints. Which is why AutoCAD was so successful. Engineering departments used to have huge rooms full of people at large drafting tables. Good drafting rooms had north-facing skylights. HP's old headquarters on Page Mill Road has four large buildings like that. [1] https://brassgoggles.net/forum/index.php/topic,43672.0.html https://brassgoggles.net/forum/index.php/topic,43672.0.html
- eternityforest 3y agoThat is really cool! I didn't even know that forum existed!