🚀 go-pugleaf

  In 1978 I was nearing graduation from High School and my Dad was trying to talk
me into the Air Force (BOTH my parents were Air Force).

 Anyway; he knew I was computer crazy so he wrangled permission to let me see the
big computer that did the air traffic in the Pacific NorthWest, in the hopes that
I'd be more interested in the Air Force afterwards.

 It was built in the early sixties, a dual design for reliablilty, each machine
(Bonnie and Clyde) took up the floor of a very large building and consisted mostly
of aisle after aisle of tube racks. Each rack had a few components on it and it was
all standardized so the technicians (60 of them!) could replace things easily.

 It had every peripheral known to man at the time: tape drives and disk drives and
drums and it had core and graphics CRTs (to display radar data), pointers that looked
like power drills (to query what ID belongs to what blip), card reader, huge flashing
panels, etc.

 The weird part was that it was supposed to be more reliable than the more modern 
machines. There were a lot of backup systems and the machine spent all its spare
cycles checking it's own components for failure. At any given time they had something
like a dozen guys ready to replace any logic gate that failed within a minute.

 It was replaced in the mid-80's with a couple boxes the size of Coke machines. The
rumour was they paid for them out of the AIR CONDITIONING budget for Bonnie. I very much
regret not having tried to get a piece of that for a souvenier after they were
decomissioned. 

-- 
 -dave fetrow-                     fet...@bones.biostat.washington.edu
 dfetrow@uwalocke (bitnet)         {uunet}!uw-beaver!uw-entropy!fetrow 

    "CP/M: Remember when fast, small, useful and clean were good?"