Mildly Interesting

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The ID plate from the first ballistics computer I was taught to operate and maintain in the US Navy. Note the date of manufacture, I was on this system from '84-'89. (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Commonly referred to as the Mark One Able. It took 5+ people to operate and all inputs were via hand cranks. This one was on a Garcia class Destroyer Escort/Fast Frigate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_I_Fire_Control_Computer

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

The Navy nuclear power plant I trained on had exactly one IC in it - an opamp in the feed water control circuitry. Everything else was magnetic amplifiers, which were state of the art technology when invented in 1901. I was operating the plant in 1988.

After that, I ended up fixing aircraft on a carrier using automated test equipment based around a 1960 telephone switching matrix powered by a 24K 18-bit word core memory CPU. We had all the modern conveniences like magnetic tape, which was a lot nicer than mylar punched tape. The month before we shipped out for Desert Storm, we got a 1MB fixed disk cartridge that replaced one of the tape drives.

MILSPEC: It might be old, but it sure is expensive.