I didn’t know “eccentric engineering” was even a term before reading this. It’s fascinating how much creativity went into solving problems before large models existed. There’s something refreshing about seeing humans brute force the weird edges of a system instead of outsourcing everything to an LLM.

It also makes me wonder how future kids will see this era. Maybe it will look the same way early mechanical computers look to us. A short period where people had to be unusually inquisitive just to make things work.