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by spectramax 2306 days ago
At the risk of sounding "out of touch with reality" and "retro nostalgic", I strongly believe that a lot of clean, sterile work took place in the 1965-1985 era. From UNIX to SR-71, everything mankind did in the technical space was minimal, purposeful, clean, legible, durable, maintainable, modular and many other adjectives that would compound on the idea of creating a truly better product or service. Marketing took a backseat, science and data mattered and advertisement was truthful.

Today's world seems broken, fragile, noisy and unmaintained. May be that humanity needs to unwind, rewind back a couple of decades and try again. If you play the scenario of human evolution multiple times, I am sure a large scale system such as global society would end up in a different state... every time.

Reminds me of the story that Kyoto, Japan didn't get ruined because one of the military commanders in charge of the nuclear bomb drop locations, had a soft spot for Kyoto... and instead chose Nagasaki and Hiroshima. [1]

If we were to replay human progress, I want us to go back to that era and relive the engineering life. Must have been amazing to work in a technical field in the 70's and 80's. Now we have AI and Quantum and all these fucking buzzwords, largely perpetuated by people who have no clue - marketing and PR folks.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/08/hi...

4 comments

I keep going back to the old AT&T phone book fonts like Bell Gothic[0] and Bell Centennial[1] largely because it was designed to be legible at small sizes when using rather primitive printing methods. In a more modern context I find it works really well on charts and whatnot, even scaled down and compressed a bit more[2].

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Gothic

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Centennial

2: https://i.imgur.com/9xNgHX9.png

Perhaps what has survived into the 21st century are simple designs and less so complex ones.
Survivorship bias at work.

Unix was a reaction against failed complex designs. So was the F-16, maybe a better example in military aviation because the SR-71 had such a unique purpose.

Popular and complex things from that era have been forgotten: PL/1, the VAX instruction set, overuse of manifold vacuum to power car accessories.

One can hope that simplicity comes in waves. Complexity is popular right now.

SR-71 was indeed extremely complex and expensive to operate. They got rid of it as soon as they could.

There are good free books available of the subject. Just looking at the amount of heat management and the required systems and heat exhchangers...

> Now we have AI and Quantum and all these fucking buzzwords

“Quantum” is from the 1920s. It’s not really a buzzword but more an adjective describing our most accurate model of reality yet that physics can provide.

The way it is used in today's marketing related to Quantum Computing is pretty fricking crazy though - I recently stumbled upon a good example:

Microsoft Quantum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ba88EwG5b0Q

If this isn't full of buzzwords, what is!

> minimal, purposeful, clean, legible, durable, maintainable, modular

Yeah, the modernist ethos. Today those would sound featureless, single-minded, featureless (yea, again), oversimplified, lasting beyond its usefulness, unoptimised, repetitive.

As any engineer, I also like the modernist thinking better, but it's not realistic, life is messy and complicated.