🚀 go-pugleaf

I have really enjoyed reading this newsgroup (even though it took quite
a while to get through the 1st 200 articles!), so I guess I should start
digging the skeletons out of my closet.


"Long Time Ago" one of the jobs I had while working for a utility company was
to work startup at a nuclear power plant.  My primary responsibility was
to get all the various computer systems up and running.

There is a device in a power plant called the turbine generator.  This is
the steam driven generator that actually produces the electricity.  This
thing is BIG, folks!  My memory is fuzzy as to exact size, but it was longer
than a football field, and I seem to remember that the turbine blades were
something like 20 feet in diameter.
The one we had was built by Westinghouse, and they had developed their
own special computer to control it.  Note that I said CONTROL, not just
take readings and report them to the operators.  

Since the first thing I saw was the turbine, I was expecting to find a
top-notch, high speed computer controlling things.

Oh, boy was I wrong!

The "computer" was in a pull-out rack mounted in a 19" cabinet.  The
"boards" were a 18" wide by about 25" high by 2" thick metal frame
that bolted into the rack.  The circuit boards bolted onto the frame
and they were all wire-wrap, except of course, the memory.  Memory
was a 4K core stack.  Have you ever put together those cheap metal
shelves where none of the holes line up and you have to go through
all kinds of contortions to make everything fit together?  Guess
what changing boards was like!
The input/output device was - you guessed it! A KSR-33 teletype with
paper tape reader.  We also had a paper tape punch mounted in the cabinet.

You thought you were worried about nuclear plants before!