Anything IT Goes
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Some of the pre-IT stuff I did in the early years of my career:
Drawing on a drawing board using pen and ink
Producing land use plans for public consultations covering several km2 using Pantone for the different colours (often having to cut out tiny pieces with a scalpel. These then had to be mounted on foam boards using spray adhesive.
Colour washing plans - these could be for 10km of road at 1:1250 scale or even 1:500 at times with 6 or more of each. It was a real art to getting the density of the colour wash correct to not get streaks and provide a consistent colour. I still had to this occasionally into the late 90s / early 00s when Councils wanted the plans as colour copying was horrendously expensive.
Making drawing alterations by scratching off the ink with a razor blade or scalpel blade
On one occasion I had to do an urgent survey and although we had the latest theodolites they were often booked out for weeks in advance so I ended up having to use a surveying chain. It was one of those things we'd been taught in college with the lecturer saying it was on the sylabus so he had to teach us but nobody used it anymore
All notices were by a memo sent to each team and then circulated. If it sat on someone's desk for a few days you often found out about something after it happened. Getting the Institution magazine with the jobs pages late was a bit annoying.
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i remember telex, teletypes and how good it was to switch to compuserve c. 1980 for internal messaging, incoming printed messages were still distributed by the internal posties :)
then in the mid-latter half of the1980s dumping all the proprietary comms for tcp/ip, encryptors and the pre-www internet, email, joyous - until everyone and his dog discovered it and the world began it's descent into the social media midden
drawing microstriplines on film with rotrings in the pre-cad days
doing really very dangerous things without risk assessment, and flying into iffy places with just an amex and a wad of dollars, they were good too
sigh
my bike - faster than god's and twice as shiny0 -
I do find it interesting that there was a sudden switch based on universities' early adoption of internet. It was just about a ailabke in one college room in 1992, but by 1995 when I started research. Every lab had a 386 or 486 or several of them. Since then it has been a question of degrees.
Going to a PhD group was also interesting. I had a supervisor who would print emails to read and save them, but he was forward thinking in most other ways, because it all helped his research. He was 60 at the time.
But going into the working world after that was like a step backwards, mixing with endangered species who wanted to avoid change.
I might be one of those now.
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Does anyone under 30 post on this forum?
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😅😅
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My school had a computer suite, and this would have been around 1977 so we were well ahead of the game. It consisted of 2 monitors that were connected to the computer which resided in Salford University. We were allowed an hour a day on the monitors at lunchtime, we had to hand write the programs so that we were ready to type them in as quickly as possible, then as far as I can remember we would get the results the following day. The only thing I remember doing was writing a program to play noughts and crosses.
When looking at University courses I had a chance to do a computer studies/physics combined degree but chose to go into engineering as I could get a sponsorship. Looking back I'm not sure I made the right decision.
I also took a summer job at a warehouse that had recently been built by a company that made parts for tipper trucks. It had a computer room in which there were various large boxes and a couple of people tending to them in paper overalls. The computer had been programmed to fulfil orders on a first come first served basis, which makes sense until you have an angry customer shouting down the phone. I was given the task of taking the kitting print outs and rejigging them manually to satisfy the most important (or simply loudest shouting) customers orders as this was outside the capabilities of the computer program. The warehouse was clearly a huge white elephant and was closed within a couple of years.
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I love the idea that employing a whole extra person is more efficient than the galaxy brains just learning to use more than two fingers to type. I think I caught the very tall end in my first architectural job - one of the senior architects would mark up a specification by hand and then get the secretary to type up the changes.
I have a very low tolerance for the "I'm no good at computers" crowd. It's such a basic life skill now.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
I think the concept of a forum pre-dates them by at least a decade. We need a TikTok channel or whatever they're using these days (probably not TikTok as I'm now aware of it).
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What about women?
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The problem with the final sentence is that at some stage you become less hands on and whilst still using a computer on a daily basis you lose touch with the software progress. That started happening to me to an extent, luckily in my current job I'm a one person team so I'm back doing all the technician work. Even so there are so many software alternatives out there that keeping on top of everything is impossible. I'm actually trying to do some self-learning on software I no longer use as it keeps my options open if I want to move jobs but it's quite tricky as not many companies offer a trial version you can use whilst training. There's no excuse for not being able to do the basics in this day and age though. Someone in my choir had a very well paid job as an electrician in a niche industrial sector but retired because he didn't want to do the computer stuff that was becoming necessary.
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Rick has left. Does anyone under 40 post on this forum?
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WhatsApp group.
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Think they’re out of favour with kids aren’t they? My kids tend to use SnapChat more I think.
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Yes but you can run an entire country by WhatsApp. If you use Snapchat it is only a matter of time before someone takes a photo of their private area.
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So I'm told.
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I think PB touched on this regarding Adobe products but the annual subscription model is pretty annoying with software and it was much better when you could buy stuff then pay extra for maintenance. It’s exacerbated in my field as you now have to by a bundle that includes stuff you never use to get hold of one programme we use regularly that used to be much cheaper when it was stand alone (prior to the developer getting bought out by Autodesk). The whole package is the best part of £10k a year which means hiring a new grad or junior technician to use the stuff effectively pushes up their cost by maybe 40% of salary.
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I have overall responsibility for our IT systems, so I need to keep up to date on both hardware and software. We're a small firm so there's not much chance of becoming completely divorced from the technical side of things. I also am frequently the one teaching junior staff how to do stuff.
I think a lot of that anti-computer attitude just boils down to laziness and snobbery. It's as basic and important as literacy and numeracy.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
Well the reality is more like 10-20% when you cost in pension, NI and a proportion of the total overheads for the office space, HR, IT support etc.
But that is still loads.
We have all sorts of subscriptions that are vital for what we do. We share logins. Sometimes we need to remind someone to log out, or be patient.
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Allegedly my second to last job used software (Foran) that costs £100k. Per seat, per year. No wonder there is a cost of living crisis and taxes are going up. I tried to fact check that but no costs are available, only "contact us".
The above may be fact, or fiction, I may be serious, I may be jesting.
I am not sure. You have no chance.Veronese68 wrote:PB is the most sensible person on here.0 -
The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to two scientists, Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield, for their work on machine learning.
British-Canadian Professor Hinton is sometimes referred to as the "Godfather of AI" and said he was flabbergasted.
He resigned from Google in 2023, and has warned about the dangers of machines that could outsmart humans.
I'm not sure if the prize is for being the Godfather of AI or his now stance warning Humanity of it's evolution!?
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Wasn't it for chemistry?
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Get on and sort that maths poster out with a picture of that noggin apple bloke.
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hinton and hopfield got physics for their work on neural networks
hassabis and jumper got chemistry for protein folding predictor, baker for protein creation tool
my bike - faster than god's and twice as shiny0 -
Why does North Yorkshire have no internet or telephone signal.
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i'd guess poor roi
my bike - faster than god's and twice as shiny0 -
StarLink?
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Who dies AI think should be on the poster?
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don't think you can blame starlink for it
my bike - faster than god's and twice as shiny0 -
Don’t ask a Yorkshireman as they’ll insist the signal there, like everything else, is the best in the world.
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I did. AI is beating the humans. These were numbered before BR formatting.
There have been many famous mathematicians throughout history, each contributing significantly to the field. Here are a few notable ones:
Isaac Newton: Known for his laws of motion and universal gravitation.
Albert Einstein: Famous for the theory of relativity.
Euclid: Often referred to as the "Father of Geometry."
Archimedes: Known for his work in geometry, calculus, and fluid mechanics.
Pythagoras: Famous for the Pythagorean theorem.
René Descartes: Known for Cartesian coordinates and analytical geometry.
Alan Turing: Considered the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.
Carl Friedrich Gauss: Known as the "Prince of Mathematicians" for his contributions to many fields.
Leonhard Euler: Made important discoveries in fields such as calculus and graph theory.
Srinivasa Ramanujan: Known for his contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, and continued fractions.
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