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Comment by po1nt | Hacker News Reader

Everytime I read articles like that, I envy the engineers that worked in development of such tools. First microprocessors in jet fighters, electromechanical celestial navigation...

And here I am fighting gitlab pipelines.

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I think the opposite. Hardware is hard, as they say. Building such complex electromechanical designs to military specs without modern CAD tools must have been the equivalent of writing code in binary, without high level languages or even assembler.

It seems GP was appreciating the beauty and purity of engineering required in solving such problems (as opposed to, perhaps, fighting AI slop today).

I'll take it any day if I wouldn't need to see docker on windows anymore.

Nothing is stopping us.

One life to experience the universe. Save up for a sabbatical. Find new engineering pastures.

It's always rose colored looking back. Not everybody got to work on this. Some people were storming the beaches...

And some people, specifically Vietnamese and Cambodian civilians, were on the receiving end of your fun little brain teaser.

And other people, like Henry Kissinger, drew random dots on a map to tell it where to drop the bombs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Menu

another real fact: "Between 1964 and 1973, the United States conducted a covert "Secret War" in Laos, dropping over two million tons of ordnance during 580,000+ bombing missions, "

I’m about to read King Leopold’s Ghost. Great choice in username.

I must say it’s a little disappointing that things like “secret bombing campaigns” getting declassified don’t lead to much public response.

The revelation of secret bombing campaigns was one of the main reveals of The Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg. This arguably turned American public opinion against the war decisively as it revealed the USA had no cohesive strategy for winning and was repeatedly lying to the American public about the multiple fronts of the war in Southeast Asia for more than twenty years.

> And some people, specifically Vietnamese and Cambodian civilians, were on the receiving end of your fun little brain teaser.

To make it ABUNDANTLY CLEAR, I was referring to celestial navigation.

I guess we have to blame people who weren't alive at the time for wars we didn't participate in?

My wife is Vietnamese, btw.

I’m sorry. I’m in a bad mood and that was unecessary. That being said, given the current hyper militarized climate in Silicon Valley, I find this detachment of the science / engineering from its use cases to be more than a little distasteful.

You are to be commended for an apology, it shows class and decency.

As for the militarization of Silicon Valley, it's been said we have god-like tech, but not the emotional discipline for such responsibilities. Aside from the fact that we humans suck, we repeat our worst mistakes without, it seems, a second thought. Then, when we're called out, we let our ego warp to any excuse that will suffice. The Kissinger example mentioned above almost made me ill.

Fun fact, that's how it started, WW2 and the need for electronic warfare and countermeasures created/set the stage for silicon valley.

https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo?si=fKlacQAM8krrW17B

Eh, it's easy to get caught by the romanticism of working on things like this, but I assure you besides like 4 people in charge of the big picture, everybody else is dealing with things which are exactly as mundane as things these days. Like putting it through 1000 heat cycles of -40 to 200 degrees and then vibrating it at 2gs for 200 hours and then measuring the tolerances of each part... or being in charge of three lines in a standards document for 2 years negotiating the details with the DoD.

I couldn't find the specification for the Angle Computer, but I've found specifications for other devices and you're exactly right: pages and pages of vibration requirements, fungus resistance, testing procedures, and then maybe if I'm lucky one page with useful information like the pinout. This is very annoying if I'm paying by the page. :-)

It's a shame the only way to work on problems like these (and make a decent living) is to make tools of war.

The end game of much of silicon valley seems to be government (read: military) contracts. Probably because its the main branch of government that's thoroughly funded

its also a branch of government that always need research so government contracts are plentiful

Defense also got silicon valley started. So it goes full circle.

I'm shooting from the depths of my memory, but I recall reading that one of the earliest government needs for computers was for the decennial census. At some point, it was requiring more than the 10 years to process the previous censuses (sp?) results.

I’m with you. The complexity yet simplicity of these mechanical devices is fascinating.

> First microprocessors in jet fighters

Don't get me started on that...

But let's say I got you started. What would you want to say about them?

The short answer is that it shows what one can get people to believe through relentless self-promotion. For a longer answer on the first microprocessors: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-surprising-story-of-the-first-...

Would you consider writing a computer history book?

Maybe at some point. The main problem is that writing a book would require me to focus on one topic, which doesn't seem likely.

Easy, just write multiple books simultaneously /s. Cheers.

Please do <3

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