Happy 7-8-9!

I think the crossed 7 is a common engineering/science/math/programming thing. I also tend to slash 0s, and when writing things will do the little symbol for a blank space - kind of a small b with a slash thru it. Plus, I also slash Zs - which I'm sure is to avoid confusion with 2s.

ellice

OTOH, I checked with my dh, who is a retired naval architect, trained in England in the days when they spent three months of their apprenticeship learning how to "letter" things. He has never, ever, crossed 4s or 7s or 0s. He is, however, still a very, very neat printer.

I guess it all depends on where and when you were trained.

Olwyn Mary in New Orleans.

I'd venture to say that your DH is a fair amount older than me. The number crossing was more something that came with writing computer code. For drafting classes - not - except for some did slashed 0s - electrical code, symbols, etc. I'm just old enough to have been the absolute last class at my uni that had to do the full semester of drafting by hand, not CAD. And, indeed, can letter as either an architect, or an engineer - mostly depending on my mood.

Ellice

Your probably right. My DDH was an electrical/engineer/designer/draftsmen and didn't use the slashes, except for the letter Z in his name. His handwriting was unintelligible and he printed everything as though he was doing a blue print.

I remember well when he was asked to buy a CAD system for his place as an experiment and he came home with the 5" thick manuals to study at home, without a computer handy to try anything on. Within 3 months he was wowing the execs in his office with using it and was doing demos for people they were flying in from all over the country to see this miracle computer program.

I don't think anyone, certainly not me, had ever seen a zero with slash through it before that. I'm wondering if that came in with computerized number systems?

Lucille

Indeed yes. After all, he IS retired!! Although he is moderately computer literate - in the early days, he trotted off to the local Community College and learned Fortran and one other program - that dates him, right? - he never aspired to CAD. In fact, he used to growl "I HIRE guys to do that!" In his later years at the office, he did no regular work, just problem solving, because most of the younger engineers, if they came across a problem for which there was no solution in the computer, figured that there was no solution. They used to come to him, he would mull over it for a while, then hand them a solution - sometimes sketched on the back of an old envelope, later on a piece of letter paper, and say "I think you'll find this will work. You enter it into the computer". Needless to say, it invariably worked.

Olwyn Mary in New Orleans

My husband would have been 73 this year and learned with pencil and paper, but he was entranced by the CAD system from the moment he saw it at a friends basement sound mixing business. That particular friend was a Bill Gates type genius who dropped out of MIT because he was bored, developed the business which he eventually sold for many millions of dollars, and introduced Mel to the CAD system. He then went back to work and talked them into allowing him to buy the necessary computer and software and learn how to use it.

It was an immediate love match and one that remained so until he died.

With very math teacher that I had if we hadn't used a very close resemblance to Times Roman for characters and almost perfect Arial for numbers our answers to math problems were marked unreadable. A bar through a 7 or a Z was distained! I can also remember a few wise? guys who once tried using the bastardized 2 to represent a capital (upper case for the younger crowd) "Q" and a treble clef to represent a written capital "S". After the dust settled we - er - THEY never did it again.

Fred

nothing changes, nothing changes.Don't back stitch to email, just stitchit.

Ah, yes. We have a buddy like that. The downside was that he fell in love with everything computer, and when he came home from work he buried himself in his home computer. He had one of the first laptops, and used to sit in the living room allegedly watching tv, but actually immersed in surfing, so his poor wife felt like a grass widow. To this day, she refuses to use a computer.

Olwyn Mary in New Orleans.

My DF as well - was an electronics & manufacturing engineer. Hence the reason I was reading schematics in 2nd grade (I don't remember doing them earlier - but I built some electrical gizmo then). I actually have his slide rule from college. And his gorgeous drafting tools. Plus we have DH's fathers stuff. We're regular antique depositories of geekdom here.

I can imagine. Going to grad school at CMU, which has a very famous Robotics Institute - I got to see some amazing, early CAD/CAM systems coming into being. My office was in the building section which attached to the Robotics group. When I started working, I remember one of the groups getting in a CAD system - and the guy who was going to guru it got to take classes at Maryland & Hopkins to master the system. The early ones - pretty complex in instructions, use. Now, you have set-ups that are more easily used for most people, and then there are the more complicated ones.

Same thing with scheduling software. There's the pretty straightforward stuff like MS Project, and then there's Primavera, or more complicated schdeuling stuff which goes through more of the probability calculations.

IME I think so. To be very sure when typing (or keypunching) a 0 versus an O. Makes a difference when you're trying to read code without taking forever.

Ellice

On 7/9/09 9:15 PM, "Olwyn.Mary" wrote:

Well, it does and it doesn't date him. FORTRAN has had many, many incarnations - usually with the year of it's coming into use, as in FORTRAN

77, etc. Most recent, FORTRAN 2003, with IIRC a revision about to be accepted for about 2008. It was really the primary scientific programming language. Depending on what else he did for work there are other languages. Most folks learned "BASIC" - besides/before FORTRAN. Then the major language used for business programming - think Point of Sales - was COBOL. And for the true computer geeks - ASSEMBLER - which is like a compressed, very dense machine language. Very difficult to learn/use. Another well used for science/math language is C, and C++.

UNIX, another more technical system language - 80s til now. And then there's LINUX.

In the 90s - the scripts you see used for the web became more what people see a lot of - JAVA, JAVA+, PERL, etc. HTML - just the formatting basic language for web presentation. I had a consulting job that forced me to learn to write PERL scripts - was not a joy for me - I'm not a web geek.

I totally understand that. Having had a tech deputy tell me that a couple of the new guys weren't sure that I really was a "technical" person since they were writing code and I wasn't. Huh? My response - and one of my favorite guys coming to bat - Just because I don't choose to write code doesn't mean I can't. That's what you're paid for - I've done my many thousands of lines. " As my friend put it - my job is to be able to look at what they've done and correct it, edit it - understand it, and guide them. My take with people writing code - you can always (well, almost always) make the code run, the math "converge" - but that doesn't mean it's right - as in the physics represented could be totally wrong. It's not uncommon with young engineers/scientists to still be in that "back of the book" answer mode. When faced with real life problems it's hard to define them properly to get solutions that are feasible/buildable, etc. I had a couple of coop students when I started work - they were a total PITA. One was finishing as a Mech Eng, the other in Physics - and they gave me so much crap til finally I and my boss explained the way of the world to them (it wasn't pretty). But, even after they graduated - still - the moaning - they'd be working on some problem and I'd finally go in to see what the heck was happening - and eventually tell them "no, the answer isn't in the back of the book - you have to work out the real thing." Which ended often with me doing as your DH did - providing some sketch of "try this for boundary conditions" etc and then they could go and play.

What the computer really did is let us do amazing quanitities of calculations in phenomenally shortened time. Which lets us see graphical results, predictions, all kinds of things in so much less time than prior generations. But, if you don't know what to do with that, or how to be sure the representation is realistic, possible, etc - it could still be crap. I always liked working with the machine shop, and would admit to the guys in there when I screwed up - as in drawing out some part that couldn't possibly be machined the way I'd dimensioned, or just wouldn't work. Many engineers just won't admit that stuff. It's definitely a knack to have the knowledge and intuition to do those back of the envelope solutions, as your DH did.

ellice

I gave away most of his stuff, except for a few items that I would love to have back. I never knew how to use a slide rule, but I did keep some of the fancy, dancy scales and metric conversion stuff. I was a kid that only wanted an erector set when I was little but no one would buy me one. It wasn't a girl's toy. I think if I were born later, I would have probably been a computer geek, or electrical engineer or something like that. In my day, it just wasn't appropriate.

He had never even used a computer till then. He would on rare occasion type something on my electric typewriter but we didn't own a computer at all way back then. To this day people talk about how he learned the system all alone, with an occasional phone call to the friend who introduced him to it at all. I think had he lived long enough or in a different time he would have been a computer guru, but he died too young.

Computers can be addictive. What I found is that when I would be doing serious programming it really requires immersion. Hence, I preferred to be working on the experimental side of research, rather than writing tons of code. The joke to me and my colleagues - just through a slice of pizza under the door to the VAX room - when I was in grad school. We had some machines, and the storage units just down the hall from my office in a locked lab (access privileges required) - so the undergrads didn't come swarming. And I could easily see the room with a handful of us graduate slaves in their for hours/days never seeing the sunlight. It scared me that I could end up like a mushroom from the cave getting sucked in. My own phobia - but I did have my days/weeks. Just would try to plan them...OTOH, first DH is a computational guy - so you could see him totally attached to a terminal for many, many hours - though he was/is pretty interesting and does other things. However, then there was the weird writing on cocktail napkins 'cause his brain is so math/physics oriented that he'd suddenly think of something and start writing the basic code stuff on whatever was handy - no matter where we were (he does a lot of microgravity research, and combustion stuff - has had a couple of experiments done on the shuttle and space station).

Ellice

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Ah...Fortran....I remember it well. I lost out on a job because I didn't know COBOL but a Fortran course (that I hated because all the labs were with business applications) and a geology course got me a job that lasted 25 years.

What amazed my DM who worked where I did before she got married was that we were doing what she did by hand by computer...and in the

25 years I worked what used to take hours and hours, or in some cases days and days could be done in a few seconds by the time I got out. And of course when I started there were researchers who had barely touched a computer...hence my job to translate their geophysical problems to the computer. Then came the PhDs who actually did programming in school....sure changed some of my job.

Nancy

DH still has all his drafting tools. Slide rules, scale rules, curves, compasses, T-square etc. In fact, the other day we just threw out some 3H and 4H pencils. When we came here from Tampa, he took a step down (not a pay cut, of course!) from Chief Eng. to Senior Eng., so he could do more engineering and less admin. He also no longer had an offce, just a cubicle, but I insisted he still take all his diplomas etc. and hang them up there, not in my house. Young guys used to come over, look at his diploma and say "you graduated *before I was BORN*....

After a few years, he also made a sort of display of the tools, and again, the young guys used to stare at these antiques. One day, one came over and said "Have you got a compass?" to which he replied, "Yes, do you want to find which way to go, or to draw a circle?" (Smartypants)

Shortly after we were married, I demanded a set of curves of my own for dressmaking - which I still have. However, for sewing I now have a mini-CAD program, PatternMaster Boutique, which helps me design patterns. I'm not very good yet, but I get by. One day, dh was watching me use the Yardage Calculator tool, on which I can arrange all the pattern pieces to the best advantage and figure out how much fabric I need. He was most impressed, said if he had had that when he was buying steel it would have saved him many hours of work.

Oh, you mentioned that solutions have to be right. Well, when you are designing ships, they sure have to be. Like, the ship has to float, it has to carry the cargo and it has to accomodate the crew. All while being easy on fuel.

Olwyn Mary in New Orleans.

I heard that many times from DH, who in a previous lifetime was a systems designer for process controls. Things had to be so exact...within less than a thousandth of an inch. As he said, "If you're stamping out 900 cans a minute, it could go from 'Budweiser' to 'udweiser' in less than two minutes!"

sue

Just to be totally pedantic Perl wasn't developed as a web language. It was developed in 1987 by Larry Wall as a unix scripting language (at which it completely rocks). It is an amazingly elegant and effective scripting language.

Best wishes, Ericka

Yeah - but as you know - I'm not a PERL geek. And the application that I had to learn it for involved implementing the script for an interactive web thing. So, it was not a thrilling experience - as the original script written by some grad student didn't do what it was supposed to do, which meant my client (this was a tech conference for the Artificial Intelligence Research geeks) just couldn't believe that what I was given didn't work, so I had to fix it. Very big PITA. The clients were insisting that something that could've been done in a simpler less fancy way - for less time and money had to be done this way as it was so cool, and after all - this is a bunch of world famous experts in their field. Ahem.

Thanks for the pedanticism.

Ellice

I can totally understand this. As my professional jobs became being, albeit younger than your DH, in that kind of role - overseeing a bunch of people doing designs, computations, predictions, fabrication. I always think it's fun to know the big picture and be able to put it all together - but still be able to understand the little details without having to do the "boring" things. OTOH, I've been known to say, "I'll do this calculation myself - 'cause I don't want to add it to anybody else, and it'll be fine" . Gets an interesting response at times. Especially when you get to go back to some guy who sent up a paper complaining that something wasn't properly designed for wind loading, and I get to point out where his calculations went astray

- and watch my tech deputy chuckle. And my boss (who could no longer do anything complicated, IMHO) ask me "why did you do this?" Well, it's fun to whip out some reference and actually put a pencil to paper - with some complicated math - got to use those references for something.

I can appreciate this. Personally, I tend to draw/draft either way - depending on my mood.

I actually have the specific garment curves, as well as all my other curves. The full set of French curves is good for doing design stuff and being sure that the pattern repeat is consistent.

Umm - well - in about any engineering problem there is something that has to be done, happen - like a ship floating, a plane flying, etc. And then all the many requirements - which is part of why military development is so expensive, and seems absurd when taken without the full context. Having sat on many requirements boards looking at systems, it's always interesting going through the "what it HAS to do, what would be Good for it to do, what would be nice, but...." = the hardest - what can you do without. DH works for the Navy, his whole career - and was a sub guy for about 20 of those years - his specialty - engineering integration. Now he's a 6- Sigma Black Belt guy - lead at his Naval Center - for teaching people about this. Which is trying to optimize processes, controls from the concept thru manufacture, fielding and maintenance. Pretty interesting -as he loves doing this but it's a daily battle kind of as he acts as an in-house consultant for various ship & propulsion programs. We're always impressed with the guys who are real Naval Architects - it's a dwindling group.

For me, my background is working in an area which has extremely low safety factor built in, lucky if we get 1.1 (most things that have people involved are more at least 2, 3, maybe more. Big hurts, big expenses if we screwed up. Which is what made it interesting in dealing with some of our simulation (code) jocks. Finally get something that looks really interesting as to some phenomena occurring, but you have to know the on the ground/in the air reality - 'cause looking at some of this could be just plain physics nonsense - or a Nobel prize. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. For me, we'd be working in very short time frames (100s of milliseconds for the fine stuff, maybe up to a few seconds) - which means really, really mathematically dense computations. So, the solutions being right - well - it's not always obvious. Particularly when you may give some formulas to a programmer who than cracks away - and can get so in love with the elegance of their math solution but not know or recognize some strange thing that has happened buried in chemistry or physics.

Ellice