Posted on 12/18/2016 6:21:56 PM PST by Lazamataz
My Father worked for around 35 years at Eglin AFB. Around 1960 give or take, he worked at building 100 plus a few others.
He would occasionally let me go to work with him when he was on the night shift. In one of the areas of building 100 were rows and rows of IBM computers. The old ones like what you see in the movies. They had large reel to reel tapes on the top behind clear windows. That room had to be kept at a certain temperature.
The most fascinating thing to me was one wall had a giant photograph of N.W. Florida. It was maybe 30 feet long and 8 feet high. The detail was so clear that I could easily make out out house in the country.
Another thing which surprised me was how much area rivers and their swamps took. They looked far larger in that photo than on maps.
The article is total trash and an uninformed lie.
The eight inch floppies do not have anything to do with the command and control of the missiles. They are used as data dumps for the crew logs and missile status reports. They have no ability to download any form of data into the computers that control the capsule and missiles.
I hear you can put recipes on those things.
Porn —yes. But cat videos are even more addicting
I had a class circa 1982 with a PDP-8. The core memory was cool. You shut off the machine at the end of the day, came back the next, turned on the machine, and everything was still there!
HAL sang a song about the wife of the 5th Earl of Warwick.
You still haven’t told us if you were allowed to watch your porn... /smile smile
You should see a film that Bell Telephone produce for the World’s Fair in Seattle. The film predicted online shopping and banking. I think the film was titled “21st Century Calling”.
So the Class I addresses hadn’t even been given out yet?
A Wang 2200 computer from 1973
Ah, DECTape. Those little reels were used as a block storage device, so they flailed back and forth as your program wrote records.
I had a similar thought....Imagine some geek at HP.
“Hey boss, I got us a Class I Arpanet address.”
“Huh?”
“A Class I arpanet address?”
“What am I going to do with that?”
“Well, it’s not just one address; it’s actually 16 million addresses.”
I took a college slide rule class around 1968. I still have the cheap plastic slide rule I used in class.
Around 1972 I had a psychology class taught by a British soldier who had been teaching soldiers in the desert before coming to Troy.
He did not like the equipment he was supplied saying he had better stuff in the desert. He did admit to one exception and he was really surprised that Troy had it.
It was an electronic calculator around a foot by maybe 10 inches. He passed it around the class then showed us how it worked. That was the first calculator I had ever seen or even heard of.
Porn didn’t show up until about ten years later. Back in 1972 it was more like a picture made on the line printer or teletype with characters. There was one of an orangutan, and one of, if I recall correctly, “Pam” who was probably a student somewhere. It was tame enough to show to your grandmother.
I was in HR...the Company President I THINK ultimately said no...not on company computers. I was never interested in porn...but the vehement calls for this “right” by these young men was interesting and eye opening at the time.
Thank you!
In the early 70s I fell in love with an HP-9100 the physics department just got. Then some kid came in after Christmas sporting a brand-new just introduced HP-35 programmable calculator (the first one, J$395 in 1972 real dollars) on his belt. Several of us gave serious thought to mugging him. It would do almost everything the desktop machine did, and worked the same way (RPN). We couldn’t see how it could be much better than that...
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