• Question: have you seen a considerable change in technology since becoming an engineer?

    Asked by daviesl3 to Amit, Emily, Joanne, Martin, Paige on 20 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Joanne Davies

      Joanne Davies answered on 20 Mar 2012:

      Yes there have been considerable changes in technology since I became an engineer.

      Before I was an engineer we had to write our first home computer games and save them on cassette tape to play them. That was in 1984-85.

      We used to have to write all our computer code first before we could do anything at all on a computer. 🙁
      it was called MS DOS. That was in 1992 when I was studying science.

      We had Word back then but you could only have one page open at a time, so you only work on one open program at a time. it could take five minutes to close a document and open another.

      The first time I ever went on the internet was at university and there was a ‘go’ button.
      I clicked it, waited for about half an hour, nothing happened and I said

      ”I’m never going to bother with this internet thing, ti’s a waste of time!” 🙂
      That was back in 1996.

      But by 1997 it had improved immensely and chat rooms and search engines had become very busy places especially for students.

      A lot of other things have changed too. We used to be able to injection mould plastics, but now we can do it with metals as well.

      We used to punch and press metal and now we can laser cut it instead.
      Laser cutting is more accurate.

      Prototypes could take a very long time to produce, but back in the 1980s we started to see prototypes produced in a very short space of time with SLA (Stereo Lithography) or 3D Printing. This means we can get products to market a whole lot faster than ever. 🙂

      Great question BTW. 🙂

    • Photo: Martin Wallace

      Martin Wallace answered on 20 Mar 2012:

      I’ve seen a big increase in the speed of computers and the amount you can do using them. Computers can perform thousands of complex calculations every second, which means we can run some pretty complex simulations and get the results very quickly. The speed at which you can get answers is very important in engineering for developing a design as fast as possible.
      The other change is in manufacturing techniques – only recently in my current job have I seen a laser being used for cutting steel tubes. We can cut quite complex shapes and sizes and bend them into useful structures to use in our products. Again this is a lot faster than doing it by hand and means we can make a lot more products.

    • Photo: Paige Brown

      Paige Brown answered on 20 Mar 2012:

      Hi Davies!!!

      This is a good question!!! I’ve seen quite a pit of change since becoming an engineer! Mobile devices and communication technology now is definitely more advanced than when I started school. Also, new discoveries have been found in molecular biology just since I took a course in it as an undergrad! My lab got lots of new equipment while I was there, including microscopes that were better than anything I had every seen before.

      So YES! Technology is changing quickly nowadays!

    • Photo: Amit Pujari

      Amit Pujari answered on 21 Mar 2012:

      Yes,

      Technology has changed rapidly since I’ve graduated, especially in the form of Computers, Mobile-phones, and Internet etc. Things are a lot easier, faster, automated because of advances in silicon research (micro-controllers/ micro-processors) and WWW.

Comments

  • Photo: Joanne

    Joanne commented on :

    I was just thinking about the following daviesI3:

    When I started technical drawing, we used A3 paper and huge drawing boards.
    We had to draw the template onto the paper by hand using engineer’s propelling pencils.
    The pencils were 0.5 mm and 1.0 mm (the same as we now use in CAD).

    We had metal rules to help us, plastic erasers, protractors and triangles.
    The engineering drawings we did took hours to create.

    Then once we had learned the basics, we learned how to draw on 2D CAD software called Autosketch.
    Later we progressed to Corel Draw and CAD CAM that included SDRC Ideas, Proengineer, Fireworks, Dreamweaver and KAY.

    So there you go, a few more technological advances.