Abstract :
Since 1935, when the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) recommended usage of the mks or meter-kilogram-second system throughout electrical engineering, we have been breaking our ties with the English units. We now find electrical engineering students emerging from college fully conversant with the metric quantities and their derivatives, and essentially bimetric in ability to convert and converse in both metric and English systems. Those graduates emerge into, and we work in, a metric world in which England, Canada, and the United States remain as English-system islands. A change to the metric system has often been urged in the United States, and we venture that the change will begin within our lifetime. If we are to make the change complete by the year 2000, we must start now. On another matter, the author also notes that the design for class B power supplies seems so thoroughly ground into our systems and handbooks as to be almost untouchable by present trends to solid-state devices. The input-choke form of filter circuit should be redundant when silicon diodes capable of handling repeated current peaks are available. Yet, that seems not the case. The author wonders if the inertia to change is due to the age of the electronics engineers who design such circuits.
