I am a retired mechanical engineer with extensive programming experience.
I started out in 1970 at Westinghouse Electric Co. as an engineering technician in the Large Steam Turbine division. Shortly after starting, I took a course in Fortran programming and joined some technicians who were taking turns as computer terminal operators. The actual computer (a CDC 6400) was in another building about 1/4 mile away. A terminal operator's job was to load punched cards into a card reader and retrieve printouts of data from a large, noisy printer. My turn in the terminal room was every other Thursday. A typical terminal room day went from 8 am to 8 pm.
Like a lot of beginning programmers, then as now, my first program consisted of a few lines of code where I multiplied two numbers together and printed the result. I tried my program on a terminal operator day when all of the day's work was completed and the room was quiet. I placed my deck of about 12 cards in the card reader and pressed the button. Milliseconds after the last card flipped into the reader, the printer started printing my job. This was a game-changer! My program was sent to a remote computer, compiled, executed and the result returned to me in milliseconds. A tool this powerful had to be mastered and used as much as possible.
I eventually earned a degree in mechanical engineering (Widener College, Chester, PA) and, later, obtained a professional license as a mechanical engineer (in Connecticut - I was working for Pratt and Whitney at the time). Over my 45 year career, I did about everything one can do in turbomachinery, from thermodynamic performance testing (the big picture) to rotor blade stress and vibration analysis (extremely detailed).
Throughout my career, I looked for ways to use computers to do the repetitive tasks encountered in my day to day activities. Over the years, my colleagues have asked me to write programs for them as well. Recently, I completed a consulting job to create macros in Excel to enable multiple spreadsheets to access a single material properties data base and calculate desired properties at specific temperatures for structural analyses.
Other automated tasks have included efficiently moving data from one application to another, quickly extracting data from various sources for use in spreadsheets and, conversely, extracting data from spreadsheets for other uses, and emailing data and attachments directly from spreadsheets and programs: all with the push of a button.
While most people do not need help with turbomachinery design, most everybody could use help in getting more from their computer. Sullicomp is here to help.