Another “What is This?” #1

Do you mean back before the internet, answers to every question ever in your pocket, before everyone had a camera in their pocket, before everyone communicated with messages and media and had to actually meet people face to face, before there was a thing as remote work, when you settled disagreements behind the building and then went for beers after? Where in the summer, kids went out in the morning and didn't come back until it was dark and parents actually trusted them to come home?

Yeah, we had a written language that we actually had to read and write in order to learn and not depend on a video to teach us....maybe the right way or maybe the wrong way.

I will say it was much harder to do everything back in the day. Was it better? No, just a lot different. The hard part is we cannot teach the younger generation how it was, because you had to experience it.
The only difference between my and my son (who is 27 and also an engineer) is I know how we used to do it and can draw from that experience, he only knows how it is done today.

The funniest thing, and I'm sure I won't be around to see it, is people my son's age will eventually be just like their parents and know the "old ways" and the new ways. You will eventually be the old guys, if you are lucky.

 

Problem with many service techs today, they're only part changers. They only know what they see in the data base to fix an issue. Years ago a tech had to diagnose the issues to component level, there wasn't anyone to say what it was. Now its just replace an entire engine, or transmission if something internally fails.

 

To be fair, it's not the tech's fault at all. The complexity of vehicles has increased by several orders of magnitude in the past 30 years. To do it today as it was done several year's ago, it would take a tech with several engineering degrees.
Why?
You can thank fleet managers and California CARB for the way vehicles are designed today. Back in the 80's and early 90's, both of these groups wanted a way to track a vehicle's health so to speak. Fleet managers for longevity and CARB for emissions. In the mid 90's the OBD 2 port was standardized. This paved the way for the plug and play mentality we have today and truthfully, it is good. Do you think you could afford a tech with a Computer Science, Electrical Engineer and Mechanical engineering degree? Me either, but that is what you would need if you didn't have the data to fix the problems.