ABSTRACT
Engineering tools have evolved continuously throughout human existence. The author has witnessed, over the last 60 years, an exponential increase in engineering computing power and speed. Engineering computing tools have evolved from pencil and paper and a good eraser to slide rules, to punched cards and mainframe computers, to scientific calculators, to personal computers, to powerful desktop workstations, and finally to cloud computing featuring rapid access, flexibility, security, and low-cost servers with a broad set of interactive application services over the Internet. Also, computer programming languages have evolved from Fortran to JavaScript. The exponential increase in computer speed and storage capacity, coupled with extensive engineering knowledge about the physical and chemical properties of materials, has allowed engineers to derive optimal solutions to complicated, interactive, iterative, and nonlinear engineering problems.
