From: Doug Jones (random@qnet.com), Wed Aug 30 2000
>Hah, I can top that- back in 1980, I was employee #2 at Otrona (Ron
>Lingemann & I working in his basement workshop), and I wirewrapped the
>prototype of the Attache portable computer.
>(Otrona went belly up in 1984. Ancient history...)
Doug, you should feel proud. My former boss at JPL *loved* his
Otrona computer. He was Principal Investigator for the Voyager 2
spacecraft photopolarimeter instrument, and he travelled with that
computer everywhere: to NASA meetings and workshops, conferences,
etc. It was the first time I'd seen a "portable" computer, and how
useful it could be for a scientist. I finshed my B.S. degree and
left JPL in 1984, so I don't know how much longer he kept that old
computer.
Permit me a walk down memory lane for some other old computers...
In the summer of 1977 my father took a digital electronics course in
San Diego, and received, in the course, a 6502 processor board (same
as in the original Apple) of 1975/76 vintage. I think it was called
a "KIM" computer. He built the power supply and the connections and
encased it in plexiglass. It had 8K of RAM, and a hex keypad for
communication and an edge connector for power and the data
connections and a LED six digit display. To program it, one used
hexidecimal commands and a cassette recorder.
My sisters and I used to play the game "Wumpus" ("Find Wumpus or
he'll find you!") on this strange little KIM computer. We had
learned how to play the computer game Wumpus in the late 1960s when
I was a kid in Hawaii and my parents had volunteered their time to
help in the Transpacific Yacht race, and the handicap calculations
for the yachts were performed daily. My parents dialed the large
mainframe computer in Honolulu on a 300 baud acoustic modem and
entered boat positions, and when the mainframe was not being used
for the yacht calculations, my sisters and I played Wumpus or
Blackjack.
My father gave me his old KIM about 5 years ago, and I tried to play
Wumpus, but I was disappointed to learn that the "Run" button was
kaput, so I left the computer with one of my Silicon Valley friends
a couple of years ago when I moved to Germany. I'm looking forward
to learning if he was able to fix it.
An Apple II and a Commodore 64 played a part in another part of my
science past in the later 1980s and early 1990s. Even though these
computers were not state-of-the art at that time, they were
*portable*, and ideally suited to astronomers who travelled with
their instruments to different telescopes to acquire data. The
aspect that I liked about these little computers were that these
simple, historic computers were in control of the key parts of our
observations.
In the mid-80s to early-90s I worked for an infrared astronomer who
provided one of the "facility" infrared instruments for the Kuiper
Airborne Observatory (KAO). The KAO is a converted C-141 military
cargo plane carrying a 36-inch reflecting telescope.
(http://jean-luc.arc.nasa.gov/KAO/homepage.html)
You can see a picture of the KAO telescope here:
http://ails.arc.nasa.gov/Images/Astrobiology/jpegs/AC90-0361-8_a.jpeg
and a view from the top:
http://ails.arc.nasa.gov/Images/Astrobiology/jpegs/AC73-4189-89_a.jpeg
I flew about a dozen times on KAO. The observing runs were about 6.5
hours each, leaving from Moffett Field, California, and flying in a
series of "legs", dependent on the location of the objects that we
were observing, but usually we would fly about half-way to Hawaii,
in a triangle route, before turning around and flying home.
We attached our infrared spectrometer and guide-star hardware to the
telescope, and the rest of our computer hardware, and us, were
sitting in a few seats near the telescope and our bank of equipment.
The cargo plane was very loud and therefore we communicated with
each other through headsets throughout the night.
A long view inside the KAO:
(the far end is the telescope, our computers were housed in the bank
to the left in the next photo)
http://ails.arc.nasa.gov/Images/Astrobiology/jpegs/AC90-0361-12_a.jpeg
An Apple II and a Commodore 64 controlled our KAO observations
in the following way.
The KAO telescope rides on a cushion of air, so while the plane was
flying, the telescope stayed fixed to the guiding star, and the
plane "revolved" around the telescope. [When a person would watch
the telescope, they would see an illusion of the telescope
revolving/rotating, when actually it was the plane that was
rotating.] The KAO operators had reasonable hardware and software to
track on a guide-star while we observed our infrared objects, but our
CCD camera hooked up to a Commodore 64, did a much better job.
Therefore, we used our own system to track on a star, bypassing the
plane's tracking system, which meant that a little Commodore 64 was
providing the information to the rest of the plane for the
navigational adjustments. In a sense, a Commodore 64 was controlling
the directional movement of the plane during our observations!
Our infrared data was aqcuired by a vintage 1980s Apple II computer,
with an A/D board inside that converted the data and then sent it to
the Macintosh Plus (later a Mac II), housed next to the Apple in the
bank; there my Mac Quickbasic software summed the photons,
calculated fluxes and stored the data on a floppy disk. Even though
Apple IIs were considered a small joke because of their processing
power by the time that we were using them, we had very simple
requirements for that computer, and it served our needs for a very
long time. In fact other groups at NASA-Ames knew to give their old Apple
IIs to us, so we usually had about 4 Apple IIs around, in various
states of assembly, to use in our observing runs.
We used the same Apple II/Mac system of hardware and software for
observing from ground-based telescopes too. I once talked to some of
the managers at Apple, telling them how we used their computers,
because I thought that it would be neat promo material for them, but
they weren't particularly interested.
Thanks for the old computer memory lane walk. It's Labor Day weekend
now in the States. Happy Labor Day weekend, everyone.
Amara
********************************************************************
Amara Graps email: amara@amara.com
Computational Physics vita: finger agraps@shell5.ba.best.com
Multiplex Answers URL: http://www.amara.com/
********************************************************************
"Sometimes I think I understand everything. Then I regain
consciousness." --Ashleigh Brilliant
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