The inverse is also true. This demonstrates how underwhelming current engineering is.
I see efficiencies to be gained in the overall integration of very task specific computers in common network.
Consider giving those old timers the same problem with todays resources and I think we would get great results.
I'm not sure what you mean exactly by the human hours comment, I'm guessing that our advances today are more from low quality, high quantity work then ingenuity? Or something to that effect? I would say that might just be a result of the perception from looking back at a time of rapid advancement, where huge leaps occurred in a short time (and that we only look back at the successful end results, not all the R&D or the failures). Much of the slowness and expansiveness of engineering projects today is due to the increased use of analysis, validation, testing, quality assurance, etc. based on lessons learned from those days. Doesn't mean there is any less ingenious stuff happening, just doesn't stand out in the same way.
As for giving them the tools of today, I doubt they would be able to do much more than the same caliber of people today. In many fields we are pushing the capabilities of materials, analysis, design, etc. to their limits.
I would say the average engineer back then might be better but that's more related to the commodification of degrees than engineering getting worse. In 1970 you had about 9k meche's graduate for a population of 200 mil, in 2015 you had about 26k for a population of 320 mil. A 3x increase for only a 0.5x increase in population. I think the increase is due to alot more people being there for the paycheck, not the passion, which I think was much rarer back in the day.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_325.47.a...
All that being said, the engineering/engineers of that era is/are amazing. I mean they did most everything with paper, pencils and slide rules. Slide rules!
Interesting enough during the rapid advancement of inertial guidance development the developers came from all walks of life and not necessarily college. There was period of maturation were the un-educated were purged from the projects.
There's a saying along the lines of "It doesn't take a great engineer to make a bridge that stands but it does to make one that barely stands.".
As for being approached with the same care, well that's hard to say overall. I don't think you'd see a project like the James Webb be successful without the care of alot of people though.
I do have mixed feelings about the education requirement that is a wall for some people. I know alot of folks that could probably have had great careers as engineers but were stopped by the high end math needed for the degree. I also know many people that have zero engineering intuition that made it through and work in the field.
Page 1 is a definition of a digital computer it progresses to number systems, storage devices, boolean algebra, logical design, code design.
That is the first half of the book up to page 38.
The remaining sections cover General purpose computing, Digital Differential Analyzer operations, Digital Differential Analyzer Programming, D.D.A. decision and servo integration, Incremental and Whole Value Solutions of Control Problems.
The book contains a schematic of subsystems and the one complete circuit in the book is of a flip-flop.
I think the systems were robust becuase the computing problem was so tightly bound to the hardware.
I have a large collection of technical documentation and physical artifacts of the same computer implemented as discreet components amd integrated circuits. The company had to invent the lithographic process to print circuits.
So ASML is very impressive but could also be seen as a derivative idea.
After all they were really Mariner 11 and 12[1], if not in name, not even the first interplanetary probes.
Rather I think it's more interesting to view engineering as finding solutions to a problem given a set of constraints.
In that sense I think both the Voyager probes as well as lot of modern engineering is quite remarkable.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariner_program#Mariner_Jupite...
I want modern computing to a svelte as possible with a direct UI that maps to the human tasks and hardware that is tightly coupled to the physical world.
Maybe someday I will have an example of what I think is good. I think I'm getting really close to what I see as 100 year computer aesthetic.
Maybe my key fob uses compute power wastefully. But I'd rather it cost a few dollars than everything that needs that amount of processing power costing hundreds of millions of dollars.
My point is that early on general purpose computing was needed to drive the cost of computing down. I think we are past that stage and it is now time to look at making everything as simple and efficient as possible.
I'd rather my stuff be inefficient, feature rich and cheap. Remember, your "simple" device is someone else's "missing critical features", your 80% isn't someone else's 80%.
If I'm a manufacturer, why would I spend hundreds of engineering hours designing my widget to be efficient enough to run on an arduino when I can spend 50 cents more per widget and use an esp32 and not have to worry about investing so strongly in computational performance for computational performance's sake.
If I'm a consumer, I care about the cost of the device, and the manufacturer spending hundreds of hours to make the software more efficient is almost always going to be more expensive than a different manufacturer that spent 50 cents more on hardware and much less on R&D.
I would prefer less waste with more care and thought.