Voyager 1/2 is a pick of human achievements in XX century. A piece of hardware run by the computer having a power that today car keys have is flying for over 40 years in the space, outside Solar system, delivering priceless information.
People do not realize how amazing engineering it must be.
Or maybe hardware overkill. I have a soft spot for small, dedicated computers like the Apollo Guidance Computer that have physical buttons and simple functionality. The DDIs on jet fighters are another example.
From my perspective microprocessor grew up around the general purpose computing model. Now the microprocessor power has far outpaced the the actual human needs the focus on general purpose is inefficient.
I see efficiencies to be gained in the overall integration of very task specific computers in common network.
I could see them being impressed with the human achievements. I have doubts if they would be impressed by the engineering. Everything I see looks more like the results of human hours spent.
Consider giving those old timers the same problem with todays resources and I think we would get great results.
I don't. Our ability to understand problems and validate our solutions for them before even a single part is made is so much more advanced today (in the mechanical engineering world) it would be astonishing to them.
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.
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!
Your last sentence best captures my thinking that generation worked so closely to the physics of the problem that the result was quite minimal and robust. I don't see today's problems approached with the same care.
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.
I would say they were closer to the problem but not necessarily the physics of them. And that doesn't really have anything to do with why their solutions were simple and robust, they just didn't have any other choice in how to build things. Their limited knowledge and manufacturing capabilities made designing complex solutions difficult and they were robust because they didn't understand the physics well enough to build them with slimmer margins.
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.
I'm basing my thinking on a publication by Autonetics publication EM-1488 in Jan. 1958. Titled an "Introduction to Digital Airborne Computing Techniques." It's 79 pages self bound book published to bring people up to speed on what is going on.
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.
don't let the doomerism get you. we have a lot of society problems to fix and reconfigure but there are still teams of people out there doing greater work than ever before.
Compared to voyager I see that as more of the same and almost disposable.
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.
I would respond that Voyager is still going compared to Mariner. The Voyager project may be derivative but it has out performed all others. I would also lump all those early inertial guidance efforts of early computing together with Voyager as the high water mark.
I think what I'm holding in such high regard is the meager resources and lack of experience caused the development to stick very close to first principles.
I think that most of the layers of technology today are actual intermediately related to the problem at hand.
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.
Is it? Key fobs probably cost dollars to manufacture. Voyager cost $865 million....in 1977.
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.
I don't think a key fob is a good example. I think if you look at what goes into word processing for the average office or almost any other office task would be my example.
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.
People do not realize how amazing engineering it must be.
One can watch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farthest to appreciate fully what all those great man did and are still doing.