Erik,

I believe that one has to go through a hard process to really learn the mental skills to becoming a good engineer. As you did, conquering an unknown puzzle and working through it is the best teacher. Universities fail in this aspect though their prefab lab assignments attempt this.

When I teach an apprentice, I intentionally set them on courses that lead to deadends and evaluate them as they ponder their way out. I will sometimes give incorrect information to see who is going to challenge all the assumptions and find the error. This is more like the situation of real world problem solving. Those that sit and accept lectures without wrestling with the information won't make good engineers.

That's the basic problem I see in handing out all the answers in forums or in projects. It doesn't usually advance the mental skills of the recipient; it only drops a module in his bag-of-tricks.

You mention the PDP. I was assigned as a Tiger-Team to finish off a troublesome city contract that the project manager and his staff couldn't finish up. One of their problems was a remote equipment alarm system was based on a PDP-11.

I hated PDPs because they meant wasted money to me. The contract required switching sites at central command when certain equipment failed. The PDP system only reported but could take no action. I called the company to buy source code or contract programming and they asked for $150K up-front money plus programming time. Instead I bought a $200 Z80 card and programmed it over the weekend to listen to the alarm report as an auxilary printer and then to activate our required switch controls. I then used the PDP system to edit the alarm names into a syntax that directed my Z80 what to do. The alarm names became the directives to my Z-80 leach. It was beautiful and the contract was soon finished. :)

aka J

aka j