I
feel lucky to have an acoustics career that has spanned most of the
“computer age.” In that time, our architectural acoustics problems have
remained the same, but our computer design tools have continued to get
better.
Starting with the shear elegance of physically wiring the
patch bay of an analog computer, to the big “ka-chunk” sounds when
typing on a massive steam-punk looking key-punch card machine; from
listening to my dumb 9,000-baud terminal dial into a liquid-cooled Cray
supercomputer; to mounting heavy 1 inch tape drives and administrating
room-size company main-frame computers; to moving individual bits in the
ever-shrinking self-contained microcomputer, and now back to the dumb
smart phone dialed into cloud-based acoustics software-as-service apps.