Article

2006-02-06 Science & Technology

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Posted by Anonymoose 2006-02-06 10:58|| || Front Page|| [1 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 Saw an Iridium flash last week, always startling.

Posted by 6 2006-02-06 11:21|| 2006-02-06 11:21|| Front Page Top

#2 2400 is blazing. Try a tty at 300 for slow.

Posted by Nimble Spemble 2006-02-06 11:23|| 2006-02-06 11:23|| Front Page Top

#3 My ASR-33 had a paper tape punch / reader, NS. I was stylin', heh.

Posted by .com 2006-02-06 12:10|| 2006-02-06 12:10|| Front Page Top

#4 Great confetti makers.

Posted by Nimble Spemble 2006-02-06 12:28|| 2006-02-06 12:28|| Front Page Top

#5 Heh, NS. I sed it to cut tapes to burn EPROMS - used to literally dance across the room on a long tape.

Posted by .com 2006-02-06 12:32|| 2006-02-06 12:32|| Front Page Top

#6 My ASR-33 had a paper tape punch / reader
a tty at 300 for slow or try 75 baud asynch...Oh, no! Not another "back in my day" Thread!
Anyone here have Manual Morse war stories? Signal flags? Helio-graph? Smoke signals?(looks pointedly at Old Spook.)

Seriously, though, I was wondering what DOD was going to do when the Iridium system finaly died. The capability is too useful to loose.

Posted by N guard 2006-02-06 12:57|| 2006-02-06 12:57|| Front Page Top

#7 Well I was gonna pull out my punched cards and then tty stories, but it's already been done.

The best I can do is having to walk 2 miles to and from school in the winter blizzards, uphill both ways .....

Posted by lotp 2006-02-06 12:58|| 2006-02-06 12:58|| Front Page Top

#8 Does having to program in Cobol with a Bachman-designed database managager count? Cause my 4 bit assembly came after that ....

heh

I had a log-log slide rule in highschool, but truth be told I seldom used it for anything beyond multiplication and division ....

Posted by lotp 2006-02-06 13:00|| 2006-02-06 13:00|| Front Page Top

#9 Lol - I remember when we got our first IBM 029 and fed boxes of cards punched on the 026 into it to get the print, lol.

COBOL, aka Grace's revenge, lol. Did a year of it at an Ins Co (IBM 360) in, um, '76, just to put on the resume, heh. Then back to Engr world - I fig'd there were only so many interesting ways to split a buck, heh. Built a wall around my desk outta card decks. I left strategic firing holes, of course, lol.

Re: the topic. $20Bn does NOT sound unreasonable, given the payback, IMHO. Congress wastes that much every hour in their ongoing porcine earmarks. I liked the Prez's call for the Line-Item Veto. It's absurd that there are earmarks, period, and equally absurd to have this idiotic tradition of deciding on a bill with 10 totally unrelated riders "as is" or not at all, i.e. veto it.

Posted by .com 2006-02-06 13:12|| 2006-02-06 13:12|| Front Page Top

#10 Ever program in MAP, through a 1401 to a 7094?

Posted by Nimble Spemble 2006-02-06 13:13|| 2006-02-06 13:13|| Front Page Top

#11 The best I can do is having to walk 2 miles to and from school in the winter blizzards, uphill both ways

we couldn't afford shoes, so to get traction we'd wrap our bare feet in barb-wire

Posted by Frank G">Frank G 2006-02-06 13:25|| 2006-02-06 13:25|| Front Page Top

#12 Heh, nope. I started in Jan '75 on HP minis. '76 was my IBM year. Then it was CDC gear at a timesharing outfit called United Computing Svcs - specialized in Awl Bidness clients. Old Seymour was a purdy good engineer (started out in AC), heh. Then they got the 4th Cray built - woohoo! A timeshared Cray, lol, with 500KB of memory, lmao. Can you say "restart files", lol? Then PC's showed up in '81 and I went solo for 18 of the next 25 yrs. Beaucoup FORTRAN.

Posted by .com 2006-02-06 13:27|| 2006-02-06 13:27|| Front Page Top

#13 Youngster.

Posted by Nimble Spemble 2006-02-06 13:35|| 2006-02-06 13:35|| Front Page Top

#14 Iridium as with many Motorola products was way ahead of its time. To say that Motorola overestimated the market for public SatCom does not even get close to the truth. Motorola is a techie company and this was a techie problem that had to be solved. I am so glad to see the DOD make use of it for what it was intended. To many of us, we knew Iridium would never make it for Public Service; however, for the very small market segment that requires over the horizon communications from anywhere on the face of the Earth, ('cept inbuilding of course) Iridium is priceless.

Thanks for posting the article Anonymoose.

Posted by TomAnon 2006-02-06 13:35|| 2006-02-06 13:35|| Front Page Top

#15 Frank, LOL. Even my dad didn't tell me that one.

Posted by Nimble Spemble 2006-02-06 13:36|| 2006-02-06 13:36|| Front Page Top

#16 Youngster.

Lol, yep, that's me. I stayed techie, ecshewed the paper pusher / mgmnt route, and 31 yrs was enuff, lol.

Posted by .com 2006-02-06 13:42|| 2006-02-06 13:42|| Front Page Top

#17 Hah!! I wired boards for the IBM 407. The earth had not yet cooled and dinosaurs roamed the earth. . .

Posted by Doc8404 2006-02-06 15:19|| 2006-02-06 15:19|| Front Page Top

#18 I wrote my first program for a DG Nova in 1971. No disk or other internal storage, so you saved your programs to punched paper tape. I then progressed to punched cards. I became very adept at punching cards with a device the size and weight of a house brick. It had I recall twelve keys on the front and you had to press 2 or 3 keys simultaneously to get what ever ASCII character you required punched on the card.

Not a skill I anticipate using ever again.

Posted by phil_b">phil_b 2006-02-06 15:29|| http://autonomousoperation.blogspot.com/]">[http://autonomousoperation.blogspot.com/] 2006-02-06 15:29|| Front Page Top

#19 Card handling is a lost art.

Posted by Nimble Spemble 2006-02-06 15:30|| 2006-02-06 15:30|| Front Page Top

#20 Good to see that Iridium was salvaged. I was outraged that they ever thought of deorbiting the satellites.

As to computers, in high school we had a Wang 8 bit with paper tape booting and I/O. We also had access to the Forest Service's Univac running Fortran IV on punched cards. Then we got our mitts on a linkup with a CDC 6400 and finally a CDC 6600 with 6400s for input and output.

I had personal friends who went on to work with Seymour Cray. One participated in the NASA Ames Cray II install. He barely managed to save the CPU from a complete meltdown. The offending PCBs had large holes in them and almost started cooking off the inert fluorinated cooling fluid they were submerged in. Can you say, devolved fluorine gas?

I also managed to get a tour of Cray Research in Colorado Springs (the old INMOS building where I once installed a plasma etcher) and saw what they had built of the Cray III. All those gold terminations made the place look like Fort Knox. Some real purdy hardware.

Posted by Zenster 2006-02-06 16:11|| 2006-02-06 16:11|| Front Page Top

#21 My favourite story about those days concerns a device dreamt up and actually built that used large punched cards as random access memory. The device certainly existed, although this story may be apocryphal.

At the time I worked for ICL who had the largest computer room in Europe in Bracknell west of London. It had a huge computer room that looked very impressive and was a popular place for salesmen to take customers. There was a salesman in our office better known for ability to think on his feet than his knowledge of computers.

This salesman took a prospect on a tour of Bracknell. Even though the computer room itself was impressive there is really not a whole lot to see. Computer equipment just sits there, although flashing lights on the front were still in vogue in those days.

So, the punched card random access device that had a robotic arm to grab the required card and place it in the reader was a popular thing to show prospects cos you could actually see something happening (and I suspect it was kept for this reason, since it obviuosly had no commercial potential).

As might be expected the device was pretty unreliable and frequently malfuntioned. This salesman was showing the device in action when it started grabbing punched cards and flinging them on the floor.

The salesman explained to his prospect that "This device is so advanced, it can tell when it picks up a card if there is a problem with it and automatically rejects cards that are faulty." He then ushers his prospect out of the room as the device continues to fling around punched cards.

Posted by phil_b">phil_b 2006-02-06 16:58|| http://autonomousoperation.blogspot.com/]">[http://autonomousoperation.blogspot.com/] 2006-02-06 16:58|| Front Page Top

#22 Hell, when I was in school we had to hit rocks together in binary.

Posted by DMFD 2006-02-06 20:15|| 2006-02-06 20:15|| Front Page Top

#23 LOL!

Posted by Frank G">Frank G 2006-02-06 20:50|| 2006-02-06 20:50|| Front Page Top

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