Right. Engineers Hammer is a 3 1/2 pound double headed hammer that they use in the work. No claws - double flat heads.
Engineers move around the world making and putting up stuff from tunnels to rails to bridges to buildings......airplanes...missiles...to large and small machines.
I know - I grew up with one in the house and one who daughters lived together waiting for Dad to come home. Both grown. Did that all of their and their Mom's life. He was a civil engineer and moved mountains. He worked all over south America.
My Dad, I and my next brother were all engineers and we moved world wide doing work as needed.
21:31:04 -0700 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:
AH, but how much were tires in hours of labor (and mean mileage till replacing) back then vs now?
I learned to drive at age twelve in pickup trucks with three in the tree. Now that was A Skill to master - especially when on dirt roads and you can barely see over the dash. ("Kids these days, with their paved roads and drivers ed in school ...") Anyway, some of those old vehicles were "fun" to drive - for some values of "fun". The rest of the time - as you observed: carbs get real finicky about weather, temps, altitude, phase of the moon, color paint ...
-- pyotr filipivich "With Age comes Wisdom. Although more often, Age travels alone."
My Altair 680B has 1024 bytes of RAM, and originally 256 bytes of eprom (the terrible 1702A).
They're still around. I recently got a drawer set full of useful transistor mixes from them for not much at all.
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Oh -- no two-shot mulded keycaps then? Well -- still a couple of notches better than the keyboards on the first Commodore Pet computers. Chicklet keycaps with anodized aluminum overlays with the key marking in the anodizing, and thin films of transparent plastic -- Teflon, I think -- on top. Those quickly flaked off, and then the anodized markings wore off almost as quickly. :-)
:-)
You know -- the post office used to have people skilled at figuring out addresses typewritten with that Obie-Wan error.
When I helped my buddy do PM on an old Baird Gamma Camera, it had a "computer" with 16 3-way toggles on it. The preload was switched in binary, then it could read the 14" hard drives. I tried to avoid learning too much about that thing, if you know what I mean.
I can imagine.
Yabbut, by that time, you'd have learned to touch-type, right? I'm sure glad I took typing in 9th grade. Lots of guys gave me grief about it, and I didn't think the old lady (30) teaching it was pretty (until 3 years later, when I realized that she was a total babe) After I got a computer, 20-odd years later, I thanked Crom that I had taken that class. It has served me well.
As well they should. Now they have trouble getting people who can even speak, read, and write simple English. Got Prep?
I had to deal with a Data General Nova, which required keying in a bootstrap loader (about 16 words, IIRC) which would then read a length of punched tape. After that, you could simply set the switches to a specific setting and it would load whatever (usually the BASIC interpreter) from cassette tape. No disks on this thing. And luckly, you only had to key in that bootstrap loader *once* (until something went wrong and overwrote all of memory) because it had core memory -- remembers things while power if off. There was a 32K semiconductor memory board and a 16K core memory, so it was important to have the core memory where the bootstrap loader lived. :-)
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If you did not already know how, it wouldn't help you. The rows of buttons were not staggered like on a normal keyboard. just a square grid of keys -- and each key had some special symbol on it (like a "heart" for print I think), so even if you could handle touch typing, that would not help you with the rest, unless you remembered where all the "special" symbols lived.
I didn't take it in school, but a great aunt taught me when I was loaned an old, heavy, skeleton typewriter. She had a bunch of rubber caps, and a wall chart, and forced me to use that instead of looking at the keyboard.
Boy has that served me well ovet the decades. :-)
Yes -- we keep getting mail for someone at the same house number, but a few streets over. (Not too much recently, but for a while it was pretty bad.) And also things for the neighbor to either side of us.
Yeah, bootstrap loader. I had forgotten the term. It may well have been a Nova that I tried to avoid working with. ;)
Nonetheless, if you had memorized -that- particular keyboard before the key markers had worn off, you wouldn't be in bad shape.
Ayup.
Makes one wonder if they might miss a vital piece of mail, like the notice of a lawsuit, which you'll lose if you don't respond, or the discovery of a large sum of money in a will by an unknown family member addressed to you...
I think we should disband the USPS and let known companies handle the mail from now on. I would likely be much more efficient (No mansions to buy for the Postmasters. Did you hear that scandal? No $1,000,000 ads during the farkin' Superbowl, etc.) and a helluva lot more reliable. Some of the postmen might be hired by the company, but most would be too damned stupid, inefficient, and set in their ways to be retained by an -aware- business. And it's not like we have an actual U.S. gov't entity delivering our mail now, is it? Just imagine, junk mail senders having to pay full boat for the pounds of daily crap they inundate us with...
Some things are still better handled as analog. As a couple IC designers like to remind people, Digital is a subset of analog. That's why so many under educated designers run into layout problems on circuit boards. A DDS is quick, but very dirty. A PLL controlled VCO has some settling time, but can have very low phase noise. That is what was used to track deep space probes at micro watt (and lower) power levels. Even the front end in the SP based RCB2000, the front end was still analog, prior to the A/D conversion of the IF of the 50 to 90 MHz range.
I never cared for HP scopes. We had some of their early digital models at Microdyne, but none of them could touch the 2565B, four channel 400 MHz scope on my bench.
I was thrown into Digital Radio by a reorg and had to learn it quickly. I think I did well enough as none of my receiver circuit boards needed a second revision.
How complex? These were $80,000, and built as VXI style cards with a plasma display on the front panel. They could process any modulation, up to the then state of the art FQPSK. They also had the ability to remote control them with RS232, RS422, IEEE-488 or Ethernet. They ran embedded Windows CE from a 40 MB M-Disk solid state drive in a 28 pin package. They had an optional spectrum display, and a 70 MHz D/A output so the data could be fed into a tape drive, or digital data recorder.
We knew what our hardware could do, but not why people were lined up to buy millions of dollars worth before they were ready for market. Being software comntrolled, they could be customized over the internet.
There isn't that much hardware difference between a digital radio and a digital sampling oscilloscope. We used oscilloscope flash A/D converters and exotic low-loss circuit board materials. Usually the radio mixes and downconverts with simple analog hardware to the Intermediate Frequency because only the modulation matters, but if you have the need and money you can capture the multi-GHz Radio Frequency directly, like a scope.
On the digital side I had already designed a multiport DRAM controller for the TMS320C30 DSP that was favored for digital radios, and really only had to learn more about active double balanced mixers and elliptical and SAW filters. A SAW is an acoustic filter, speaker > tuned pathway > microphone, that operates at 70MHz.
Now you can find do-anything Software Defined Radios cheap at ham flea markets.
formatting link
"Most receivers use a variable-frequency oscillator, mixer, and filter to tune the desired signal to a common intermediate frequency or baseband, where it is then sampled by the analog-to-digital converter. However, in some applications it is not necessary to tune the signal to an intermediate frequency and the radio frequency signal is directly sampled by the analog-to-digital converter (after amplification)."
The NEAR ham fleamarket this past weekend was mostly rained out, but I did find a used (1% wear) Micron SSD for $40 and 750GB 100MB/S HD for $30 to speed up the dual-core "parts" laptop I bought there last spring for $25. It boots Win 7 in 20 seconds. Now I have to learn the secrets of properly setting up Solid State Drives.
The cheap SDR radios work for some applications, but how many can do all the functions I described at the same time? How many have a $450 10 MHz frequency standard that can be tired to a local standard source? Can they do doppler offsets to follow a satellite as its speed changes? Can they process a 40 MHz wide video signal?
You know, I can't play mine's-bigger-than-yours with sensitive Air Force projects. I did integrate a Rubidium 10.0000000 MHz atomic clock into one of them. I was a newly hired lab tech without an electronics degree and that circuit which counted the time and more importantly resynchronized it to GPS was the first they let me design.
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