Posted on 12/18/2016 6:21:56 PM PST by Lazamataz
My first computer was an IBM360 ... in 1978. FORTRAN, punch cards, waiting for the batch ... seems like a billion years ago.
We had a couple CRT terminals (maybe Datapoint 2200) in the math lab but they were underutilized (which is to say not at all).
We did those on ham radio RTTY too (I suppose some still do). At 45.5 Baud it could take many hours to send one of those pictures. My neighbor had a store & forward mailbox just for teletype pictures, ran on a Apple II+ with a custom RTTY modem board and a pair of 5 megabyte Rana hard disks.
I have seen some pretty “untame” ones, and very detailed at that. There were some operators in some places who had a lot of spare time for sure.
Could be
A one-quarter megawatt power source the size of a thirty gallon drum, that vaguely resembles the appearance of R2D2?
Never got that close. There was a big window that let you see the wonderful machine.
I was the COMSIXTHFLT senior enlisted meteorologist in 1992, stationed onboard the USS BELKNAP CG-26, homeport Gaeta, Italy. While I had an onboard weather satellite receiver in my very small MET space, I could only print the image to brief the staff.
The science advisor told me he could use my office phone, dial into a university lab in Rome and download a satellite pic on my “new” 4mb ram 60mb hard drive computer. Then, I could copy the file to a floppy disk and take it to the war room, upload it into the secure network and have the best method to brief the SIXTHFLT staff and update the battle watch officers and watch standers.
The SA said he thought it would take between 6 to 8 hours to receive the file. We set it up at 1800 one evening, I heard it connect to the lab and left for the night.
Needless to say, it didn’t work. Damned computers...and the Italian phone lines.
About 3 months later, I heard that an ET Chief had developed a satellite looping program using a Mac or whatever they were called then. I made a deal to have it delivered to the ship. It was the slickest piece of technology and a leap in capability for me to support the admiral, his staff and the BELKNAP CO and crew.
The techs showed me how to take the signal out of the satellite receiver, connect to the Mac and voila, I had grainy B&W Meteosat and GOES-E sat pix. The program kept 10 images in memory...but I still didn’t have a method to get the info out of my little shack.
Then I had a brilliant flash of insight (BFI)...I got one of the techs to take a coax cable out, run through the cable ways in the bulkheads and overheads to a switch box connected to the input of the large screen displays in the BELKNAP combat information center (CIC) and to the war room large screen displays in the C6F staff spaces.
That was the very first shipboard satellite looping capability in the USN.
I remember working with a roomful of PDP-1170s about 30 years ago.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.