Mechatronic Systems Engineering

Among the first texts to use the term [Systems engineering] was Louis Ridenour’s Radar System Engineering, published in 1947 as part of the Radiation Laboratory’s series of textbooks. The title refers to the physiological sense of system, that is “how to engineer a radar system,” – where an individual radar is a connected set of components like magnetrons, waveguides, power supplies, and display tubes. Title does not refer to the philosophical sense of system, as in “how to system engineer a radar,” but such ideas are nascent in the book: it covers not only wave propagation and noise models, but also the appropriate design of displays and the dissemination of information through a radar organization. Ridenour’s text includes no discussion of feedback or servomechanisms, or of the dynamic characteristics of radar systems. A McGraw Hill text, System Engineering [by Harry H. Goode, and Robert E. Machol, published ten years later, included probability, analog and digital computers for simulation, queuing theory, game theory, information theory, servomechanism theory, and sections on “human engineering,” management, and economics.

A man should build a house with his own hands before he calls himself an engineer.

A key characteristic of the engineering culture is that the individual engineer’s commitment is to technical challenge rather than to a given company. There is no intrinsic loyalty to an employer as such. An employer is good only for providing the sandbox in which to play. If there is no challenge or if resources fail to be provided, the engineer will seek employment elsewhere. In the engineering culture, people, organization, and bureaucracy are constraints to be overcome. In the ideal organization everything is automated so that people cannot screw it up. There is a joke that says it all. A plant is being managed by one man and one dog. It is the job of the man to feed the dog, and it is the job of the dog to keep the man from touching the equipment. Or, as two Boeing engineers were overheard to say during a landing at Seattle, “What a waste it is to have those people in the cockpit when the plane could land itself perfectly well.” Just as there is no loyalty to an employer, there is no loyalty to the customer. As we will see later, if trade-offs had to be made between building the next generation of “fun” computers and meeting the needs of “dumb” customers who wanted turnkey products, the engineers at DEC always opted for technological advancement and paid attention only to those customers who provided a technical challenge.