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In Reply to: RE: Twenty years ago today via the wayback machine... posted by E-Stat on September 13, 2020 at 13:43:56
It was a pun on "UNIVAC."
The vacuum-tube computer.
In the early 1980s, I had a girlfriend (and y'all are... Shocked... SHOCKED!) who actually was a math whiz (and y'all hit the floor).
She was out of a job, and she applied for one that seemed possible. The people who interviewed her, she reported, seemed... apologetic.
It was a defense-related operation that perhaps had as its mission to use various technologies to track potentially threatening foreign submarines.
So they talked back and forth, and eventually, one of the interviewers said (this was, remember, the early 1980s), said, "Awww, we might as well show you what you have to work with."
They led her out the back door of the modern office building to a Quonset hut. Inside the Quonset hut, there were huge electric fans on stanchions pumping damp near-ocean air over... racks and racks of vacuum-tube computer components.
It seemed that the customer (the US Navy) never wanted to pay the money to have the old software re-coded for a modern mainframe, so... they did their calculations on vacuum-tube hardware.
But then again, critical calculations for the Manhattan Project, especially the estimation of the "starting states" of the reaction, were done on paper with pencil; and when there was disagreement about what the starting state should be deemed to be, one of the scientists pulled out a handful of pocket change, and dropped it on the table.
That story is, IIRC, from the book linked to below.
atb,
john
Follow Ups:
When we're talkin' Mr. Peabody and his boy, Sherman, yes, it is as you say.
But when we're talkin' internet -- no.
Revisionist history's like that.
... or maybe copyright (or trademark) law.
;)
all the best,
mrh
it's really about the man in the mirror isn't it?
Hi John
Did they use tube computers when Amstrong went to Moon?
Bill
They also used wooden stud framing on the interiors of their subs.
Budget issues.
Sigh.
jm
to what we made. Furthermore, there rocketry is without peer... right now.
The Mind has No Firewall~ U.S. Army War College.
Nt
n
some 6H30s in my ARC preamp.
Thanks to inmate Victor K. for introducing those and 6C33s to the audio world. :)
at least as far as a manned landing on the moon.
The computer necessary for control of the lunar lander used chips made by Rockwell Semiconductor (they called them ELSIs or LSIs at the time) with 40 pins. The Soviets had no computer technology snall enough to fit inside a landing craft and the time delay between earth and the moon was too long for earthbound computers to be of any use.
Those Rockwell chips?
Shortly after the mood landing that technology, paid for by American Tax Dollars, was sold to the Japanese and came home to us as Sharp electronic calculators
IBM was the supplier and used a large System/360 for tracking purposes and a custom hand built module using core memory for the onboard instrument section.
Here's a video with one of the former engineer's explaining its operation:
View YouTube Video
In late seventies, we used a NASA mainframe with a program called NASTRAN for some of our Finite Element analysis of structural slab systems. We had little terminals into which we fed our punched cards and the results came from Omaha. The girls used to make mistakes in the punching and the whole thing would bomb. It was tough to find good punchers so nobody was let go! The Space Frame analysis was what I loved most.
Cheers
Bill
nt
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