Taking a Walk
on the Wild,
Wild West Side
of Technology
By Dan Wiseman
Did you ever see that movie
Wild Wild West Like most
folks, I did. Unlike most folks,
however, I liked it. I saw it as a
fantastic little world where
high technology and amazing
engineering exists without the
benefit of modern computers.
It kind-of made me wonder
what the world would be like
if the transistor revolution
never happened.
t’s important to realize that digital computing has
only been in existence for about six decades (and
mainstream for about three) and yet people have
been creating amazing things for thousands of years. We
had airplanes and trains before computers. Mass-produced
automobiles were around well before Apple, Microsoft, or
Sun. Leonardo Da Vinci never once sat in front of a CAD
workstation for long hours into the night and yet somehow
managed to design machines whose core concepts
continue to inspire.
I hate computers. This is why when most of my friends
chose an educational path in Computer Science, Computer
Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or (ugh) Programming,
I went with Mechanical Engineering. It’s more concrete
and real to me. A computer is just a magic box that does
what I tell it as far as I’m concerned, and it was this
philosophy that spawned our senior design project.
Myself, Salvador Alvarez, Oscar Joya, Daniel Aldama,
and Hector Polvo are mechanical engineering students at
SERVO 11.2009 53
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