davenn, if you've still got your own teeth, you're younger than me and hevans1944, and you HAVE seen a dino before. Just take a look at hevans1944's avatar. I don't use an avatar because it'd be even more scary.
I am presently working in a metrology lab that services (among other things) new and old air force gear that hevans1944 used to work with.
You might be surprised to know that, as hevans1944 claimed, a lot of the old dinosaur test and measurement instruments have not been improved upon.
People probably won't believe that. Every generation thinks they're the cat's meow, the newest, best and brightest.
We talked about this before. The oldest instrument I have here was made in 1957. Nothing we've bought since then is more accurate.
We're talking cold-war, pull out all the stops minds with the money to develop the best they could, and build it to last forever.
Sure, as Hop also said, components age and drift, but the remarkable thing about the old stuff was, that it was specifically designed to be repaired.
The engineers that designed it just didn't realize that one day the replacement components would disappear.
I used to go to garage sales in a city that was chuck-full of retired WWII machinists. The tool steel I bought from them is in the most beautiful, hardest precision tools I've ever found.
Think about it. We know about dinosaurs, because we're still unearthing their remnants. New engineers are smart, but the old ones weren't stupid either. And there was a time when money was no object.