FAMILY3 - Who Says Nothing Ever Changes?
Pat and I were talking the other day about all the changes that have made our lives easier, safer, and perhaps more interesting. Pat suggested that this was a good topic for a blog, so here goes. I’m going to reflect on how the principle activities of my life, that have been, or are, most important to me, have changed over my lifetime. I’m 80 years old now, so I have a lot of stuff to reflect on. Calculating. In the early 1960s, as a student at Purdue, I carried a wooden slide rule to make a variety of engineering calculations. When I started my engineering career, developing computer simulations in FORTRAN, I had to punch each line of code into a single card on a card punch machine, submit a metal tray holding my hundreds of cards to the main frame computer, and wait until the next morning to get a result. By the time I retired in 2000, we had networked desktop computers with all kinds of power and flexibility. Along the way came simple electron