I have greatly enjoyed the memory fest here. Wasn't going to join in, but,
Steve, your email really hit close to home. I replied to Steve, intended for
whole group.
Took 'Mechanical Drawing' in Jr. high, loved it. Also had drawing classes
(course also included slide rule) first semester of college.
I was a co-op student in EE and worked for NASA 1962-1967. I was placed in a
software group, kinda out of my degree, but I liked it and spent my career as a
Software Engineer (in the day we were called 'programmers.')
I was greatly blessed to be working at NASA at the beginning of operations in
Houston. The first computer I worked on was an IBM 7094, 32K of 36 bit words,
2 microsecond cycle time, mag tape OS, no disk. We were located in what had
been the PBS TV studio on the University of Houston campus, reworked to be a
computer center - the space center (MSC) was under construction. Languages
were FORTRAN II, assembly (FAP) and eventually FORTRAN IV and assembly. Punch
cards of course.
Slide rules indeed! However, we also had a Friden mechanical calculator which
could do square roots!!
Ham rig at the time was a homebrew 6AU6-6146 from a QST article and
Hallicrafters S-19R with Heathkit Q multiplier, dipole on 40m cw.
As you, Steve, indicated I could not afford the HP 'digital slide rule' --
bought the TI version about a year later for a cost 1/2 of the HP, used it for
years. Still have my K&E DECI-LON (and a B-29 'Load Adjuster' slide rule from
WWII).
I remember all the items you mentioned.
Finally (at last) I often tell younger folks (I am 77) that they have orders of
magnitude more power in their cell phones than we had in our gigantic computers
-- BUT -- we put men on the moon with 'em.
Sorry for the wide bandwidth,73,John K5ENQ
On Monday, April 26, 2021, 10:36:33 AM CDT, SteveL <[email protected]>
wrote:
I envied a friend in a EE program and the University of Cincinnati. He had
the first HP-35 I’d ever seen the year it was introduced (1972), but it was way
out of my budget as a new freshman studying Engineering.
A couple of months after my friend acquired the HP-35, to my fascination he
received a letter from HP detailing a list of obscure calculations the device
performed in error (the tangent of 98.2352…, etc.) . The letter went on to
describe that these were determined and then verified by computer simulation of
the computational algorithms used internally - a concept new to this budding
engineer. And, if he returned the calculator, it would be repaired and
corrected.
And to think we basically flew to the moon on a slide rule? Who could ever
imagine a computer that could fit into one room? (Paraphrasing a line from
early in the Apollo 13 movie.)
Who carried around a CRC book of tables of various calculations in lieu of an
unaffordable scientific calculator?
Or programming FORTRAN on punch cards?
Or PDP-8 on paper tape after toggling in the boot loader through the front
panel switches?
We’ve come a long way! I love the reminiscences…
Steve
aa8af
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