Speaking of radios:
One time, around 59 or 60, when we were flying mail out of recently Castroized Cuba, (I was assigned to a transport squadron for awhile) we lost our 400 Hz (generators) and all of our navigation and communications were gone. We were headed to Jax but decided we should try to get into Mia since we knew we could find it. ;-) Mia was socked in with a ceiling of about 1,000 feet. At that altitude, at night, in the rain, you couldn't find crap. There is a harrowing story here about how we finally found sight with the ground, but that is too long. There was nothing but a sea of lights. We weren't high enough to pick out the rotating beacon from the A/P. We flew for what seemed like a week, all over Miami, at 1,000 ft or less, looking for an airport. A couple of times we flew low enough to try and read the street signs to find out where we were. I think we made it in ok, but don't remember. Sorry, what was the question?
Al
At 11:51 AM 12/13/2002, you wrote:
Hah! How about this: When I was at Collins there was a "computer room" that was roughly 40' x 30', temperature and humidity controlled. The computer system was running on IBM punch cards. Cutting edge technology in 1965/66. We were also building or rather, trying to build single layer microchips and flatpacks - handwired under microscopes! We had something like a 60% failure rate. Also, we tried to build crystal filters to replace mechanical filters for radios. That seemed to work out o.k. After Collins took a dump I worked at Honeywell Keytape division. We were building machines that would convert punch card data to magnetic tape. We sold a lot of them. They didn't work very well either. The division also was trying to develop magnetic disc technology. The discs were about 16" in diameter and had something like 40% - 50% unusable space. After that division flopped I hooked up with Varian Data Machines. We were building "desktop" computers. They were literally the size of an office desk top. That company flopped as well. I wasn't designing any of this stuff. My expertise was in assembly and tooling design along with all the other stuff IE's did. Later in industry it was management. My knowledge in electronics was essentially Ohm's Law and turning switches. So I became fed up with the instability of the electronics industry of the '60's and decided to get out. That's when I got into full-time club repair - 1969/70. No computers needed. However, being a "gadget freak," I owned a lot of computers.My personal computers were, in order, a Sinclair, a Commodore, an Apple II+, a portable (that which can be carried) Panasonic 8088, dual 5 1/4" floppy, thermal printer unit, an Epson Equity II, a clone 286, a clone 386, a clone P100, a clone P something, and my current one, a clone Athlon 1.4 gig. I ran DOS until 1996. Certainly not golf stuff but what the hell, its a slow day in the Central CA Valley. TFlan > > (3) Before the 1980s, disk drives were physically BIG, separate units. A > typical disk storage for a mainframe might be a box the size of a washing > machine, and every bit as heavy. Even the arms that carried the read-write > heads were heavy. Back then, it was sort of a rite of passage for > programmers to write a program that would move the heads in synchronism to > shift the weight back and forth rhythmically, in such a way as to make the > unit "walk" across the floor. (Well, actually it sort of shuffled.) Since > computer centers were (still are) based on raised floors in the machine > room, a walk in the wrong direction could send it tumbling off the raised > floor and damage some hardware. > > Not golf, but somewhat amusing. (To me, anyway.) > > Cheers! > DaveT > >
