Old Escapement Radio System

I thought we were ahead of the game back in the '80s with Perkin-Elmer 32xx series mini's, running OS32 at McDonnell Douglas. Structural Test Lab Data Center had a 3240 with 8 or 16 megs RAM, 4 300 MB removable platen packs each the size of a 2 drawer file cabinet, 2 1600 BPI and 2 6250 BPI 10" reel-to-reel tape units, modem bank and 16 users in 7 refrigerator sized cabinets, all running around 4 MIPS.

My father worked at little Air Force, a radar/computer station at Fort Lee Army Base, VA back in the early '60s. The building took the better of a city block, one floor was main computer, next was the backup computer. It was modular, you pulled out a rack with tubes and low scale integrated circuits.

The generator used to power it was powerful enough, that the City of Hopewell was powered several days a week by the local utility company and the rest of the week by the Air Force.

-- HPT

That is funny, isn't it?

I repeatedly point out that I was with NASA Manned Spacecraft Center in 1963, and I retired from Neo-NASA, but we in Old-NASA went to the moon using slide rules. We had two mainframes at mission control and all they did was simple calculations in Newtonian physics...but real fast.

I saw the computing power of the Apollo Command Service Module written out one time and I recall they were only Zilog-80s. This would put the clock speed around 6 mhz, tops. The ram was less than what I had in my modified TRS-80 4Ds.

We talked to the stars and walked on the moon with slide rules. I saw my first hand calculator in 1971. It was a $385 HP. NASA wouldn't buy them for us because they were frivolous and were too easily carried off.

When I retired from Neo-NASA in 1991, every desk had more computing power than we ever had going to the moon several times. And this NASA is still celebrating our slide rule accomplishments because they can't do anything to celebrate.

I do not consider repeated "Return to Flight" ceremonies to be anything to brag about. I just hope the survivors of the failures understand how happy they are supposed to be that Neo-NASA has attained such a diversified cultural staff.

Cheers, Ken, the Luddite.

NO, no, the modern micro system provide for PROPORTIONAL action of th magnetic actuators, exactly as the old Adams actuators did, only thi time two or three actuators are controlled simultaneously. J.M.Piednoir (designer/maker of JMP receivers

-- JMP_blackfoo

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Okay, my bad, so they pulse back and forth likewise, interesting.

Talking about miniaturisation, I remember when Nick Ziroli built an R/C Fokker D-VII with a 12 inch wingspan, using a Cox .010 and transistorised single channel escapement system. This was considered small back in the '60s.

We have come a long way.

-- HPT

Ken Cashion wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Perhaps also solving problems like statically indeterminate situations? Numerically solving integral and differential calculus equations that normally can't be solved?

I liked playing around with CP/M-80 and my 4 MHz Z80 based Xerox 820-II in 64 KB. IIRC, the 4D had a bank switching scheme.

That is amasing. Sometimes it seems that employers are more concerned about losing a piece of equipment than a valuable employee who would cost them considerably more if and when they left.

In the work place there will always be some who think their employer owes them a living, and from what I have observed, that attitude is not based on racial make-up.

I think what has happened is a change in the morality of the workforce, where those before felt they had a job to do, and did it best with the tools at hand. Unfortunately in some employment circles, politics and catering to prevent offending one's feelings has become more important than productivity.

-- HPT, the nostalgia flyer Luddite.