>>>BS Metallurical Engineering eons ago, but always worked as a mechanical engineer doing various types of avoinics software.<<<
Well, with my never ending interests in all things... There was only one field that came close to capturing it for me...
Agricultural Engineer.. Civil/Structural/Electrical/Mechanical all rolled into one... See, Jack of all trades - Master of none...
LOL In College, a spreadsheet was hand written and calculations were on our trusty slide-rule... First calculator I ever saw/used was a Marshant (sp) All mechanical - gears, sprockets and numbered wheels - the carriage did a ka-bump and jumped over as it changed places on the calculations. It used to hang quite often, and even the manual said the fix was to lift it about 10-12 inches above the desk and drop it.
>>Avionics<< LOL Again.. When I took flight training, it was a two sided Circular Slide-rule Like an E6B... compass, turn and bank indicator, and oooh, some of them had those fancy gyroscope thingys that you absolutely had to lock down (cage) before you practiced spins...(really messed them up if you didn’t)
OK, I am a little bit computer literate though...I started programming on an IBM 1401 (4k RAM) in Assembler Language. (self taught)..Yep, 80 column cards, keypunch - verifiers, sorters and collators... Used them all. (Hey, I remember IBM saying they had solved the data storage for decades into the future - a 96 column card that was even shorter than the 80 column ones... LOL) Much later taught Lotus 123,dBase3, Word Perfect and Basic Programming at local Jr. College and Adult Night School...
Hey, the spreadsheet inventory sounds neat! Ummmm, any possibility of sharing???
I have tinkered over the years with them to where I had a steady stream of big-whig financial people coming to see what I was doing... I took a Commodore Vic20 and a 300 baud modem and was copying radio teletype and then when the credit bureau wanted you to buy their teletype machines, I told them nope - just want the service no equipment... They said it couldn’t be done (wrong thing to tell me) so I got them to give me the info and login and I showed them...
I later wrote a basic program to massage their output and put it into a CSV file and imported it into Lotus 123 and built a credit modeling spreadsheet to do loan application evaluations for our credit committee. That one brought a ton more interested people... LOL So I have had some fun with them.
Seriously, I would like a copy if possible... Never thought of emailing expirations. Neat idea.
>>>Just that the engineer in me can’t resist doing the basic calculations..<<<
I think I was always that way... As a teenager, I would sit there on the tractor plowing, and count and time the revolutions on the tire - figure out how many acres I was doing an hour, how many tons of soil I was turning over in an hour, in a day... All mental calculations - just for something to preoccupy myself with...
Then when I look at the news, I figure out all those billions and trillions and calculate the costs per person, per day, etc...
Sometimes people get upset with me because I regurgitate their own figures back at them in different terms that really makes people sit up and pay attention...
They don’t like to hear that since Øbama was elected, every man, woman and child in the US has lost $31,250.00 in stock market equity... Hey, even a 1 day old baby would have to work, so they could take the loss of $15.02 per working hour for a whole year right along with the rest of us.....
All in just 10 weeks since Øbama won the election....
At this rate.....( Better quit... This could be scary.)