When I was an under graduate at UNSW in the early ’60s I used a slide rule as my main calculator for engineering problems. I had no idea until recently that I was in the analog world. By the second half of the 60’s I was carting around boxes of punch cards for my post graduate work. The idea of the digital world was not front of mind. I’ve discovered that engineers don’t think about the foundations of mathematics, they just use the best tools available at the time.

I’ve just finished reading Turing’s Cathedral by George Dyson and was fascinated by the battle between mathematicians and engineers to develop the first digital computer a decade earlier in the 50’s.

Von Neumann( mathematician) and Bigelow( engineer) as the senior members of a team at Princeton Uni in the USA managed to build the first digital computer against the odds. I was the beneficiary in 1970 when I was running large transient flow models for natural gas transmission on a UNIVAC 1108 machine in Sydney.

I only mention this because Freeman’s book opened my eyes to a whole new world of the computer in 2020.

Analog vs Digital has become the topic of the day. We hear about quantum computing but nobody says where it fits ( it’s analog). We have traversed a great circle from analog to digital and back again, in 70 years. In truth the future will be a mix of the two but you have to learn about the strengths of each to take maximum benefit.

Rahul Sarpeshkar gives a great talk on TedX on Analog Supercomputers https://youtu.be/ZycidN_GYo0

In the late ’80s CMPS the largest Consulting Engineer in Australia at that time decided to form a subsidiary State Wide Roads (SWR) to tender for the right to build, own and operate the first private toll road of the modern era. Grahame Campbell describes in his book ‘Clarinets, Pipelines and Unforeseen Places’ the road that took him to that position. The changing landscape for engineering delivery in Australia was the main driver. The following is an extract from the book describing that critical moment.

‘The SWR board met to review our position with the roads authority. Various government agencies needed to sign off on the details of the road design and the bank confirmed our loan arrangements. Statewide Roads had overcome all the questions posed by the legal reviews. A week later we were advised that Premier Nick Greiner was ready to sign a contract. Alan and his team had achieved a major coup. However, a huge job lay in front of them to deliver on the promises we had made. the greatest day in the 75-year history of CMPS was upon us.

Unfortunately, most people in the company had no idea of the importance of this win. In a strange way, it attacked the basis on which the company had been founded. The independent ‘consulting engineer’ providing dispassionate advice to clients had become the major shareholder in a toll road. We had crossed a boundary, in a sense, but the journey had started much earlier. Our main competitors were international contractors who were hard-headed businesses. The idea of professional independence was not part of their history. My forays into advertising a few years earlier had highlighted the divergence. I still believed our strength lay in our professionalism and fought hard to convince our clients that their welfare was our principal objective.’

Engineers in Unforeseen Places 

The link below takes you to the Uni of NSW interview

https://www.engineering.unsw.edu.au/news/the-evolution-of-an-engineer?utm_source=TractionNext&utm_medium=Email&utm_content=Existing&utm_campaign=UNSWEngineersSpring2016