David Mindell, a historian of technology, put it like this: The wartime efforts of Bell Labs in fire control contributed to a new vision of technology, a vision that treated different types of machinery (radar, amplifiers, electric motors, computers) in analytically similar terms—paving the way for information theory, systems engineering, and classical control theory. These efforts produced not only new weapons but also a vision of signals and systems. Through ideas and through people, this vision diffused into engineering culture and solidified as the technical and conceptual foundations of
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