OMG. I completely forgot about DRUM drives! Amazing technology for the day.
----- Original Message -----From: Gary OrpeSent: Saturday, January 02, 2010 10:22 PMSubject: RE: Light-Sport Aircraft Yahoo group Was: .....Paperwork, Now:Helen
In 1972 I brought back, from Albuquerque, New Mexico, a control system for the Edmonson Pumping Plant here in California. I worked for the State of California back there as chief inspector and advisor to the company. It took two years to build it ready for delivery. It had a 24K ,16 bit drum memory with 28 fixed heads. The drum controller itself was made into a 19" three bay rack mount. The drum was made by Vermont Research and was almost 24" round and 18" tall. The Honeywell 316 computer was an 8K core memory machine and ran at the high speed of 1.4 MHz. The drum was on a DMA unit that fed the CPU. The whole operating program resided in the core memory with databases and reload on the drum unit. All programming was done in machine code, line by line. There is 16 pumps 64 Megawatts, yes Megawatts, each controlled by the system. It scanned 2000 digital points each second from the plant and 1000+ analog values every three seconds. It had 1200 relay contact outputs. It had line printers made by Potter that had blade hammers that fired against a spinning tube with a spiral hump so that when the roll was just right and the hammer fired it would print a dot at that location on the paper. It printed 3 128 character lines per second. There were two of them. They were on the DMA as well. It printed the ASCII dot matrix character set. The machine was programmed with punched paper tape made on site with a TTY AS33 machine. I later changed to a cartridge tape R/W unit.The system was installed in 1972 and ran with the same CPU and all other hardware for 32 years. It had to be shut down to make place for the replacement units. I am rather proud of that.That was one plant in a series of plants down the California aqueduct (The Jerry Brown Canal). All had similar systems built by different manufacturers with lesser inputs that the big ADE plant. A similar system was built by the same company for the Pearblossom plant that I help build. I was on the testing and development team for most all the system down the 600 mile aqueduct, from Oroville Pump plant down to Perris reservoir in southern part of the state, spending my last years at the ADE and Area Control Center near Bakersfield.What does this have to do with Sport Aircraft? Absolutely nothing but it sure was a fun time to remember the beginning of this time at the new year ahead of us.Haven't told that story in a long time. Thanks for letting me remember all the things that have past us that our kids will probably never know about.Gary Orpe
-----Original Message-----
From: Sport_Aircraft@yahoogroups. com [mailto:Sport_ Aircraft@ yahoogroups. com] On Behalf Of Bill Hobson
Sent: Saturday, January 02, 2010 2:54 PM
To: Sport_Aircraft@yahoogroups. com
Subject: Re: Light-Sport Aircraft Yahoo group Was: .....Paperwork, Now:Helen
Ah the good old days. As a field engineer I recall having to load a deck of about 400 punch cards to load diagnostic software into the 360's with their new-fangled disk drives. IBM's disk drives had a hydraulic actuator to move the heads, held a whopping 10MB and cost something like $13k each. I know the industrial revolution was a pretty big deal, but can anything touch the scope of the silicone revolution that we got to live through? It's been amazing. Today's youth is so jaded about the technology at their fingertips, but if you really consider it, it's like magic!----- Original Message -----From: Adam ShaikenSent: Saturday, January 02, 2010 5:29 PMSubject: Re: Light-Sport Aircraft Yahoo group Was: .....Paperwork, Now:Helen
Hey Son!,We had a few of those left(from the war I guess! actually they were still in use by the news services-the UPI the AP wire and others were still utilizing it.) at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in 1978 when I first began to explore computers and programming. We had an IBM 360/370 Mainframe and PDP 1135/45 running the local timesharing system and we were connected to a the Central timesharing system sown in Long Beach. Some times an assignment would have the students using the punch tape mode of inputting to a computer but mostly we were utilizing the new fangled IMB punch cards(80 characters wide by ? lines and oh those 'chads' !!!) for inputting data into the IBM 360/370 Mainframe. Actually we also could use terminals but certain professors would require that you were still competent at using all resources even antiquated or soon to become antiquated technology!!.
On Sat, Jan 2, 2010 at 4:13 PM, Bill Hobson <wrhobson@aol.com > wrote:
Do you mean to tell me that there is another human on the planet that
remembers what punched paper tape was? Holy smokes! (Sorry if this bothers
anyone for being off-topic, but this is like finding your lost
birth-mother!)
----- Original Message -----
From: "John A. Price" <japrice@mindspring.com >
To: <Sport_Aircraft@yahoogroups. >com Sent: Saturday, January 02, 2010 10:15 AM
Subject: Re: Light-Sport Aircraft Yahoo group Was: .....Paperwork, Now:Helen
> How 'bout them 45 baud Mod 28 teletypes... I remember installing the first
> of the automated
> routing boxes so they didn't have to punch a tape at a routing stating and
> move it over to a
> reader to send it out on it's next leg.....
> John
> My first computer 1976!
>
> On Saturday 02 January 2010 09:49:07 Gary Orpe wrote:
>> Boy, that goes back in time. I remember marveling over the new 1200 baud
>> modem that were on 3 plug in cards. Remember 110 baud, TTY days gone by?
>> How did we ever manage major control systems at that rate? LOL
>>
>>
>> Gary Orpe
>>
>> K6DWT (Keeping 6 Dancing Wild Tigers)
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Sport_Aircraft@yahoogroups. com
>> [mailto:Sport_Aircraft@yahoogroups. ] On Behalf Of Jay Maynardcom
>> Sent: Saturday, January 02, 2010 5:51 AM
>> To: Sport_Aircraft@yahoogroups. com
>> Subject: Re: Light-Sport Aircraft Yahoo group Was: .....Paperwork,
>> Now:Helen
>>
>> On Fri, Jan 01, 2010 at 11:52:48PM -0800, Roger Poyner wrote:
>> > > Accepted etiquette on the Internet has been to quote and reply as I
>> > > do
>> > > for at least the last 30 years. Yes, it's been around that long, and
>> > > then some
>> >
>> > -----Problem is the internet hasn't been around that long.----
>>
>> It has indeed. You simply weren't around it then. It was around,
>> connecting
>> governments and academic institutions, in the early 1970s (then known as
>> ARPANET), and switched to the TCP/IP protocols we all use now in 1983.
>> ARPANET expanded dramatically, and its replacement (in management;
>> nothing
>> else really changed) by NSFNET in 1985, followed by NSFNET's opening to
>> the
>> commercial world in the early 1990s, produced the INternet we know today.
>>
>
>
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--
Adam Jay Shaiken
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