20

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

all 6 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[-] octopus@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

"I had to lube the computer"

[-] Grumble@lemmy.world 2 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.

[-] c0mbatbag3l@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] Mutelogic@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

Cool! How did you get your hands on the id plate?

this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
20 points (100.0% liked)

Mildly Interesting

17306 readers
385 users here now

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.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS