Roger, It's Just Test Equipment

“Roger, it’s Just Test Equipment”: Lessons From Four Decades of Engineering 1985: the year introducing both Microsoft Windows and the GNU Manifesto; 2025: the year of GPT4.5 and injectable pacemakers. This talk is for those entering or about to enter the technical fields. It will focus on a few lessons learned in those intervening four decades. The lens and perspective are from a career not in one of the big visible tech firms, but in the technology of measurement and numerical analysis. Such has allowed a small-town boy to get direct and more objective exposure to wider variety of some of the more visible technical innovations of those forty years.