Interesting carbon fiber body kit

[tigerbalm]

writing a computer programme

Do you remember in what language? And what hardware platform? VAX?

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[f1eng]

Do you remember in what language? And what hardware platform? VAX?

Fortran, punched cards on a CDC 6600 iirc

Imperial College where I was a student had 2 computers the CDC and an IBM 360 (again iirc).
I believe there were only about 2000 computers on earth when I started using one.

 

[TDinDC]

You all are making me daydream (nightmare) about building finite element models and needing to let them run all night only to realize upon verification the next morning that there was a minor error that meant we had to redo and run the next night when enough computing resources were available!

 

[tigerbalm]

There is a lot of Fortran still out there! But yeah, even today Fortran could be somewhat relevant for thermodynamic equations. Wikipedia stats suggest its even making a bit of a recent comeback.

Though I suspect more specialised platforms like Mathlab would yield quicker results.

 

[f1eng]

You all are making me daydream (nightmare) about building finite element models and needing to let them run all night only to realize upon verification the next morning that there was a minor error that meant we had to redo and run the next night when enough computing resources were available!

That was every day reality! Even before FE!
After I graduated I worked in R&D and the company let me stick my suspension geometry deck on the back of the weekend run, so as long as all the company work got finished my run was free. But only one run a week - better be no mistakes.

 

[f1eng]

There is a lot of Fortran still out there! But yeah, even today Fortran could be somewhat relevant for thermodynamic equations. Wikipedia stats suggest its even making a bit of a recent comeback.

Though I suspect more specialised platforms like Mathlab would yield quicker results.

Most people use Matlab these days.

 

[TDinDC]

That was every day reality! Even before FE!
After I graduated I worked in R&D and the company let me stick my suspension geometry deck on the back of the weekend run, so as long as all the company work got finished my run was free. But only one run a week - better be no mistakes.

? I remember the pain. Mine was architectural/structural, and after we had broken down a project and modeled it, to learn that we had wasted a whole day/night due to some stupid punching/entry error rather than due to a need to adjust the structure due to the analysis was nearly more than one could take!

 

[tigerbalm]

But only one run a week - better be no mistakes.

A time when the machines were expensive and the people cheap.

Complete opposite now and we have a situation where an iPhone takes 1 billion operations per photo it captures and post-processes.

 

[tigerbalm]

We can't rule out that Porsche aren't still using punchcards to update the PCM. Would go a long way to explaining the eight-hour update process.

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