I am a recently retired control systems engineer in the US with 45 years experience. In every project we worked on we made sure the end user owned the custom programming, system configuration, and all the process data. I think it is a mistake for a customer to accept anything less.
In the 1960's, my brother and I would walk about three miles (over Red Mountain in Birmingham AL) to the closest Radio Shack. We would each get a free battery using our cards and usually we didn't buy anything. Eventually we became pretty good customers.
I got my third MRI after having a titanium plate put in my neck, and wow was I more nervous that time than the earlier two times. I made the tech let me test the panic button to prove it worked. Of course there was no problem with the MRI.
Twenty years is a mighty short time period for expecting a huge paradigm shift in industry. In 1973 I was touring industrial plants and got to see an automated retrieval and delivery system operating in a plant warehouse. (It might have been the Copolymer plant in Baton Rouge - hard to remember.) So even 50 years may be a bit too short.
Looking back a few hundred years it is easy to see that we have made progress. In the mining industry, for example, the need for large haul trucks is reduced by long conveyors. The longest I have seen is two miles. Those conveyors are barely attended to by operators and their operation is monitored by control systems connected wirelessly and reliably.
The real leap will come, not from increased automated operation, but from automated maintenance. That won't happen until well after IOT is more fully implemented. By that, I don't mean more devices connected to the Internet. In my opinion, IOT's potential lies in the future of the "Things" making decisions based on information from the connected devices.
If I remember correctly, some have called it the "Zone" and it is described in the book "The Inner Game of Tennis" by W. Timothy Gallwey. It has been a long while since I read it.
Coming from the Controls Systems Industry, I have seen a few flavors of the SRS. Sometimes we call them Functional Requirements Specifications (FRS). The IEEE has a decent standard for how to put one together, although they call it Software Design Description, "IEEE 1016-2009 IEEE Standard for Information Technology--Systems Design--Software Design Descriptions."
The two industries where I worked where these are well recognized and their use enforced are Nuclear Power and Pharmaceuticals.
Some personal wisdom that I picked up is "If it can't be verified, it isn't a requirement." As an example, I was one told to change the tagnames in a program to "something meaningful." I went through several iterations before I realized that, with this particular customer, that was unachievable. None of the tagnames I built had meaning to him, and he would not give me guidance as to what would be better.
We have pet chickens that we close up every night. I built a door to let us open and close the chicken run from a web page. The door slides horizontally and is driven by a cheap electric drill motor with an all thread rod, which acts as a worm gear, and is controlled by a rpi.
I learned this technique in the mid 70s, but I didn't attend MIT. I still remember a math class in 1973 that was sort of rowdy. One of the students was presenting. He wanted to draw a circle on the board, but there were actual, occasional, spitballs. If he took his eyes off of the class he would have been a sitting duck. Not to be deterred, this student, Kem, stood at the chalkboard facing the class with a piece of chalk behind his back, touching the board near the bottom. He swung his arm out and up and, at the same time, began to pivot around. His chalk went up to the top of the board, all the way around, and back to the bottom just as he turned to face the class again. The circle was elegant, no one had time to launch a spitball, and he gained another level of respect in the class - he already had a lot.
What came to my mind is "An Introduction to Microcomputers" by Adam Osborne. I don't think I can find my copy anymore. If I remember correctly, there were block diagrams showing the main functional components of a microcomputer, E.G. the ALU, Arithmetic Logic Unit.
There are plenty of technical comments here, but I have to say I got a great laugh from this post. I have dealt with many of the absurdities state side, so I can relate to your experience. By the time I got to the words Windows XP Screensaver, I was laughing so hard I couldn't read anymore. After finishing, I bookmarked you. Looking forward to more. Thanks.
>My guess is that the people who used slide rules in their professions and were willing to pay over $50 to re-experience the nostalgia of playing with one again are now all dead.
With the exception of the part about willing to pay over $50, I can say we are not quite all dead.
A co-worker once told me he had two of three certifications for fireworks. I forget what they were exactly, maybe one for manufacturing, one for transportation, and one for operations.
In 1973 I visited the office of a chemistry professor. He and his research partner seemed to be on somewhat of a downhill slide. For years they had dreams of discovering a catalyst that would let water break into hydrogen and oxygen from exposure to direct sunlight. They never found that catalyst, and after nearly fifty years, I never even hear the concept any more.
I don’t think a really good title exists, but the closest might be “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Control Room” by Gregory McMillan. It is basically a comic book written by an engineer in the industrial controls field.