Mechanical circuits: electronics without electricity
- Thread starter GURPS
- Start date
Not strictly mechanical, but my last assignment in the CG was creating/updating engineering procedures for the recently acquired CGC Alex Haley back in 2000.
My "holy crap" moment was when I was working in the engineering control station. I climbed under the control console and found the equivalent of a pneumatic computer. Small air lines running all over the place with inline modules that performed the required logic functions to control the main engines. I had never see anything like it before or since.
Fortunately I didn't have to do any documentation of that system. I'd likely still be there.
My "holy crap" moment was when I was working in the engineering control station. I climbed under the control console and found the equivalent of a pneumatic computer. Small air lines running all over the place with inline modules that performed the required logic functions to control the main engines. I had never see anything like it before or since.
Fortunately I didn't have to do any documentation of that system. I'd likely still be there.
Oh, that was the Hagglunds crane I assisted maintaining "off book" at HLSS in Piney Point.
black dog
Free America
Yes, when I started in the trade US Company Haughton was the leader in electronics.
They were bought out by Swiss Co Schlinder.
Probability 80% of the elevators then were relay logic. Mid and highrise elevator machine rooms were packed full of relay controllers.
Along with one or two controllers counting to pick which elevator took the call.
The old mechanics would answer a service call and listen for a bit to the controller for the problem elevator. And usually walk over and tweek a contact with a orange stick or pencil eraser. Open Contacts and relays
Click clack click click ping clack click.
black dog
Free America
If that was available when my son was growing up I would have bought it for him.
Used to do that with 7-track tape drives. I could hear when the drive had a tape parity error.
Damn. Earliest I had hands on was an MFM hard drive.
This was a Control Data 1700 pre-processor, had to flip switches to program the bootstrap program. You 'talked' to it with a model 33 teletype with paper tape reader. 20 feet of racks with a separate rack for each function like input/output, computation, A2D conversion....
My first real code writing was done on punch cards. Sit for hours punching cards, read the deck in, get a printed result, only to find you made a mistake in card 6 of 2000.
I have a PDP 11/05 out of a desk that had 3 massive power supplies .. 6 Volts a massive Amp output. feed by 220 AC
the top of the desk had this Control Data marked Panel
Switches Tape 1 Tape 2 Take 3 Tape 4
2 back plane racks with various cards
PDP and VAX series from Digital were the bomb.
black dog
Free America
I remember voting in 76 and maybe the 80 elections on IBM punch cards.
Grumpy
Well-Known Member
those were the days..I remember booting up a Honeywell mainframe with paper tape. I worked in a computer room with 5 different IBM 360 systems plus couple Honeywell antiques. The IBM systems would punch out a card for each job that was run so we had a daily count of 2 to 3 thousand time accounting cards. After about 5-7 years, the govt boss asked us to get rid of the accumulated cards and to throw them away. Me and a buddy loaded them up in his pickup truck (took about an hour) and hauled them to the scrap yard in Greenbelt and split $70 bucks, this was probably around 1979.