| Well, 50 years ago when I started assaying caustic soda cargoes, bureaus like ours were not yet using computers for this in the chem lab. The bench technique was not as repeatable as I needed to begin with, but the easy calculations were identical to how it had been done using slide rules, only electronic calculators were the modern replacement. The fourth decimal place really maks a big difference when you've got thousands of tonnes. There was one caustic plant where they had a very specialized lab apparatus that allowed better precision, but we were not going to be able to adopt that approach worldwide in our independent labs. I figured out a way to easily reproduce the results using ordinary apparatus, but the calculations were far too hairy for most bench operators to adapt to. And that was with calculators, nobody would have ever done this with slide rules. So I wrote a little Basic program on the Commodore VIC20 that we had in the office just to experiment with. With 20/20 hindsight I was the first and only programmer at this particular multinational at the time. Then it was a breeze to just assay the easy way on the bench, type in the readings to the VIC20 and out came the result. Ended up leaving the company to build a lab in another port before this could be deployed elsewhere, did configure the code for a few different platform Basics before the IBM PC became so common, and used it myself ever since whenever I need to break out the big guns to settle a dispute or something. One of the reasons I think it lasted so long for me is because it solved a problem that existed many decades before I came along with a systems approach that included code for the first time in history. |