This is for strictly mildly interesting material. If it's too interesting, it doesn't belong. If it's not interesting, it doesn't belong.
This is obviously an objective criteria, so the mods are always right. Or maybe mildly right? Ahh.. what do we know?
Just post some stuff and don't spam.
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
"I had to lube the computer"
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.
Cool! How did you get your hands on the id plate?
Nice! All I got out of the Navy was a chunk of a P-8 that got torn off during a class A mishap from the squadron we relieved.