ggbutcher
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Oh 1980, pivotal point for me. I'd just finished college, earning a business computers degree because it got me into pilot training. There, we used a VAX 11-30 to learn CoBOL and such, didn't get too interested there because I was going to fly...
A year later, washed out of pilot training, assigned to the computer career field because, well, I owed them 4 years for the education. They sent me to the Eastern Test Range at Cape Canaveral to fill a slot just vacated by a fellow going to the Air Force Academy to coach the women's volleyball team. That turned out to be a poignant experience in the technology shift, oddball collection of systems and machines whose tech spanned the decades. Remember the relay-rack telephone exchanges, where you could watch, and listen to, calls ratchet themselves down the racks? Range Safety engineers were still using an IBM 1401 and decks of punch cards to do their trajectory analysis. The critical real-time range safety calculations were done on dual Control Data Cyber mainframes. Downlink telemetry was captured on computer tape, some channels still captured on strip charts. Things were being upgraded, but that process was slow due to the criticality of the mission and the lack of tolerance for errors and failures.
During that time, I took my masters in comp sci at Florida Institute of Technology. Half the classes were at the Melbourne campus, the other half at the KSC admin building. Campus classes were taught by folk with rather dated experience; I recall one class where the prof spent a good hour going through the dynamics of mercury-column memory. KSC classes, on the other hand, had adjuncts who worked on the then-nascent Shuttle ground systems; my compiler classes were taught by a fellow who wrote the LCC panel interface configuration language. I remember taking my discrete systems class at campus, learned all about digital logic through Karnaugh maps, then next semester taking my microprocessors class at KSC from a fellow who told us to forget all that Karnaugh crap. My first computer was a homebrew S-100 bus affair, Z-80 microprocessor and 64K of RAM; built it with the help of one of the civilian engineers from work. It weighted 80 pounds, but sported spiffy semiconductors.
Sea-change, indeed...
A year later, washed out of pilot training, assigned to the computer career field because, well, I owed them 4 years for the education. They sent me to the Eastern Test Range at Cape Canaveral to fill a slot just vacated by a fellow going to the Air Force Academy to coach the women's volleyball team. That turned out to be a poignant experience in the technology shift, oddball collection of systems and machines whose tech spanned the decades. Remember the relay-rack telephone exchanges, where you could watch, and listen to, calls ratchet themselves down the racks? Range Safety engineers were still using an IBM 1401 and decks of punch cards to do their trajectory analysis. The critical real-time range safety calculations were done on dual Control Data Cyber mainframes. Downlink telemetry was captured on computer tape, some channels still captured on strip charts. Things were being upgraded, but that process was slow due to the criticality of the mission and the lack of tolerance for errors and failures.
During that time, I took my masters in comp sci at Florida Institute of Technology. Half the classes were at the Melbourne campus, the other half at the KSC admin building. Campus classes were taught by folk with rather dated experience; I recall one class where the prof spent a good hour going through the dynamics of mercury-column memory. KSC classes, on the other hand, had adjuncts who worked on the then-nascent Shuttle ground systems; my compiler classes were taught by a fellow who wrote the LCC panel interface configuration language. I remember taking my discrete systems class at campus, learned all about digital logic through Karnaugh maps, then next semester taking my microprocessors class at KSC from a fellow who told us to forget all that Karnaugh crap. My first computer was a homebrew S-100 bus affair, Z-80 microprocessor and 64K of RAM; built it with the help of one of the civilian engineers from work. It weighted 80 pounds, but sported spiffy semiconductors.
Sea-change, indeed...
