Engineering software is written by engineers and it shows.
I remember using software in a digital design class in 2004 that was written for Windows 3.1 and would crash if you used filenames more than 8 characters long.
A year later I took a circuits class that had a large amount of simulation coursework. Assignments were required to be completed using a proprietary, feature crippled program that was locked to prevent working with designs that had more than 50 components.
A final anecdote that comes to mind was a 400 level advanced digital design class I took in 2008 where your grade was dependent on simulating hardware on 200 MHz Sun workstations. The lab that had these machines was also only open certain hours of the day, so in order to have any chance of getting your work done you pretty much were running in there inbetween every class. (I hacked this situation by “volunteering” to be the lab supervisor for the room in question, which put me in charge of locking up for the night…)
Engineering school is hard enough as it is and it doesn’t help that all the software is awful, closed and tethered to platforms that are old enough to apply for a drivers license. How can we expect students to be researching and developing the next great things when the tools they have to work with are so fundamentally bad? With the leaps and bounds of progress made in the last 20 years of computer hardware and software, this situation has become totally unacceptable.
As a thought experiment, I’ve been asking myself the following questions:
What engineering software exists that is open source?
Can engineering code run in the cloud?
Can engineering design work be done on mobile devices?
This genre of software seems ripe for disruption! Innovation in engineering software, although possibly unglamorous (I doubt Techcrunch is going to get fired up about an open source digital design package) has the potential to make a big difference – I am definately excited to continue brainstorming and to see what I come up with!