Power to the engineers!

OK, so I am nearing 80 years of age and therefore not supposed to understand the web, online payments and any modern stuff like that! But I do!

At least I’ve convinced myself how good I am! I’ll have a few bob on myself when it comes to competing with the youngsters and all the clued-up whiz-kids who appear to live online. Nonetheless my faith in myself as an elderly online wizard has just been severely shaken.

Consistent with my self-image, I like to pay bills online whenever given that option.

One such online opportunity arises when, like many other people, I am required to pay the next dollop of money to Telstra for the privilege of being able to ring people and receive calls. I’ve just paid the latest bill for their services.

I naturally expected it to be a straightforward transaction, just following their online instructions.

My computer was, as always, charged up and ready to go! My brain was as in-gear as ever and I had their latest quarterly bill in front of me.

I admit that, after fiddling about for more than 20 minutes, I had to get my wife’s help to put the right bill amount into the right bill amount space.

I then had to tell them from which of the family’s account it would be paid.

I eventually sorted that out after several trips to various rooms to find out our account number and name.

I also had to reassure myself that the nominated account had sufficient money in it to cover any eventual Telstra withdrawal.

I’m fairly sure that it was just my own stupidity but let nobody think that paying bills online makes everything easy.

I wonder how many Telstra customers give up their attempt at modernity and simply go into the local office and let them sort it out as you watch in awe...

There is not much that can’t be done online, not many things where access to solutions, your own and other peoples, can’t be achieved and used “for better or worse”.

The opportunity to use irrelevant or dodgy solution techniques is now enormous.

The challenge for today’s problemsolver is to identify the RIGHT solution from among the multiplicity of “options” available to the inquiring mind at the simple press of a button.

I began lecturing at Birmingham University in late 1962 and I soon encountered the need to teach students how to program using newly emerging techniques such as The Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC).

This was a brilliant language developed by two Americans, John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and widely available from 1964.

It made it possible for non-specialist scientists and engineers to develop computer solutions for many of their projects. It also did much to improve understanding of otherwise complex problems.

My task in those early days was to learn to program in BASIC, and thence integrate this problem-orientated language into the everyday teaching of many different engineering problems.

I think that BASIC and a range of other programs, not least FORTRAN, revolutionised the ability to describe many engineering tasks and to provide a learnable tool for their solution.

It is amazing what can be done when you have a programming language that allows the user to cause quantities to be added together, subtracted or divided.

It is brilliant when the same Code allows you to only do things when other things are true (”IF .... THEN .... ELSE”) and then prints out the answers.

It puts enormous “solution power” into the engineers’ hands and does not require them to “hand over the engineering” to an unknown guru who you have to rely upon to have “got it right”! I really enjoyed those early times!

NONETHELESS MY FAITH IN MYSELF AS AN ELDERLY ONLINE WIZARD HAS JUST BEEN SEVERELY SHAKEN.