Finally reaching the end of Dyson’s biography, and the impression I’m leaving with is mostly this notion of “all of you, everyone really, can MAKE things.”
Use cardboard, or fold paper airplanes to test wing shapes, or weld together metal bits — it’s not that hard, really.
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As a software person, this idea is … alien to me?
Dyson talks about how the Concorde engineers folded paper planes and threw them in the office to test wing shapes. How his earliest vacuum cleaner prototypes were cardboard shoved into the back of an existing vacuum.
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I think there’s something wonderful about that — you don’t really get as visceral a sense when making software, because it’s all bits in the ether.