On Fri, 31 Aug 2007 20:43:42 -0400, "J. Mc Laughlin"
wrote:

I had the opportunity at Ohio State to craft a system that measured very
wide BW noise that changed slowly and to add statistical measures to what
was measured. Today, the task would be trivial - a sound card would run
circles around what I did with a voltage to frequency converter,
accumulator, counter-made-into-a-sidereal-clock, punched paper tape, and an
IBM 1620.

Hi Mac,

Last night at dinner, I had a conversation with a former HP exec and
we rambled on over glasses of Burgundy about how kids had lost access
to "flipping bits" on the computer, and instead played on them. What
this has in regard to the quote above is that newer technology may
have made everything simpler, but the laborious route you took drew
together many issues and gave you a visceral connection to the
process, building an instinct so to speak.

For instance, your allusion to counter-made-into-a-sidereal-clock may
not be fully appreciated for its "sidereal" quality which is a specie
of time with a continuous slip against civil time. This would be a
source of constant irritation for one being tugged away from their
Cesium Beam Standard. (At a rate of something roughly at 4 minutes a
day?)

So in some sense the solution becoming "trivial" removes intuition
from the problem.

73's
Richard Clark, KB7QHC