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Original Message
Please: "WABAC"
Posted by John Marks on September 17, 2020 at 19:40:38:
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