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Check this out: http://www.cpushack.net/space-craft-cpu.html Ahh yeah... Those old CPUs are still used! - Jason ________________________________ From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, March 02, 2007 1:11 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [COUPERS-FLYIN] Re: OLD AND RELIABLE COMPUTERS. ----[Please read http://ercoupers.com/disclaimer.htm before following any advice in this forum.]---- Way off subject. I was quite fortunate some years ago to meet a lady who had a very unique job. She worked for a NASA contractor that did the maintenance and operation of the mission control center in Pasadena. She offered me a tour behind the scenes of the facility. For those who have not yet been disappointed by their visit to NASA, The regular tour is a very limited walk around, (done texas style in a golf cart train), some very limited areas of the facility. The main emphasys is in the visitor center where the gift shop and restaurants are (revenue generating areas). To see some real stuff, you have to know someone. She invited me to see mission control where the real business is done. To my surprise she showed me the old IBM 286 model computers that run the real mission control which is basically parabolas, orbits and velocity calculations that are all done using DOS 6.22 operating system on computers that she has carefully selected from many office buildings. These computers had to have at least eight years of burn-in time in a non-smoking environment. The DOS 6.22 was probably the most stable operating system for the job. Attached to this system's output there is an overlay of windows based computers that only receive information from the DOS system to generate graphics and displays for the press. The real guts of the calculations are done in DOS and human inputs are few and limited. The whole system has a triple power supply redundancy system to make sure it does not go down. And it had zero failures to the date of my visit. And the cost of this "certified" old reliable "someone else's junk" is quite high too. AF N87333 ________________________________ AOL now offers free email to everyone. Find out more about what's free from AOL at AOL.com <http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/1615326657x4311227241x4298082137/aol?redi r=http://www.aol.com> . ======================================================================== ====== To leave this forum go to: http://ercoupers.com/lists.htm ============================================================================== To leave this forum go to: http://ercoupers.com/lists.htm
