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We drove fast cars with big engines, bias-ply tires, manual transmissions, drum brakes (no “anti-lock”), and neither transistors nor “electronic chips” controlling the drive train.

Lucky, if we had tinted windows, seat belts, AM/FM radio, front disc brakes, power steering, power brakes, and air-conditioning (after-market add-on).

We had slide rules, drawings, and schematics . . . all worked out on paper.

And we had FORTRAN.

My first computer course was a Sperry Univac 2nd gen.; and the professor was one of the developers of that machine. No monitor. Several RED lights and toggle switches - no cards, but there was a paper tape punch/reader thing.

We made metal, and we were really good at it. A friend made the antennae for the Apollo spacecraft and landers.

When we wanted a satellite view of weather conditions, the image was rendered and printed in Alabama. A USAF pilot would leave Texas, thence to Alabama, thence to Wright-Patterson AFB.

Now days, I find it difficult to accurately convey the focus we had, how we pursued what worked and constantly double-checked things.

Yes.

I posted a few weeks back that engineers now may have better external tools to work issues, but I have begun to suspect that today they lean on those tools too much and neglect the creative engineering power of the greatest computer of all, the human brain.

Back then (I am speaking to people like YOU linMcHlp!) they didn't have these awesome external tools they could offload engineering knowledge onto, so they had to depend on their own engineering skills, and the skills of those they collaborated with. IOW, then, they had SUPERIOR engineering skills and INFERIOR tools, and now, they have INFERIOR engineering skills and SUPERIOR tools.

I had expresses this opinion in the context of the use of AI, and how I suspect there are many out there who hope that AI will somehow close that gap left by the diminishment of the engineering skills.

I came to that conclusion recently after watching this video about the SR-71, a plane that amazingly first flew in 1964: LINK: How the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird Works

The whole video is astonishingly well done and entertaining to boot, but the link above takes you to a specific point in the video where they discuss the flight controls, particularly...

"The Mixer"

The "Mixer" is, to me, a ridiculously elegant device to handle flight control in a new way that had never been done before that time (that I know of). All the movable flight surfaces at the tailing edge of the body had to move in a coordinated way to provide pitch, roll, and blends of both when a combination of pitch and roll are needed.

Nowadays, it wouldn't be very complicated, right? You have a computer that would provide input to the controls to make an unflyable plane...flyable. But back then, they did it mechanically, linked with...cables to hydraulic boosters. It is brilliant. And development was begun in 1958!!!!

It isn't that I don't think engineers can do this kind of thing today, they obviously could, I believe. But I think it would be harder for them to conceive of.