21–30 of 66 posts
sometimes you do wonder how USSR, with all these mad scientists and engineers, could ever go down
To be fair they were facing pretty much the entire rest of the worlds fight against "evil communism". It's more remarkable how far they got with essentially a new way of trying things.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair they were facing pretty much the entire rest of the worlds fight against "evil communism". It's more remarkable how far they got with essentially a new way of trying things.
What a nonsense.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What a nonsense.
It's not nonsense that during the cold war the US & allies put sanctions and trade embargos in place for the USSR & Warsaw pact countries, similar how we have with Russia today, meaning their goods had a limited export market, plus they had restrictions on high tech imports as well leading to the Toshiba-Kongsberg scandal. Also, with the USD being the global reserve currency, the USSR & Co. were dependent on the USD…
> The Globus INK is a remarkable piece of machinery, an analog computer that calculates orbits through an intricate system of gears, cams, and differentials. It provided astronauts with a high-resolution, full-color display of the spacecraft's position, way beyond what an electronic space computer could provide in the 1960s. If nothing else, at least skim through this article to see the photos. It really was quite a…
For someone who grew up with the internet the fact this is mechanical blows my mind.
Marc mentions how Teletypes would commonly run with one or 1.5 stop bits. You need this to tell the mechanical parts to "lock up" at the end of a character. Preferred would be to run with 1.5 stop bits so that the machines became self-synchronizing -- if the wire got reconnected in the middle of a character they would start producing readable output again after only a few garbled characters.
The way the camshaft worked was each bit had a window of time where it could be set or cleared (marking vs spacing) by the solenoid. For letter H the bits are 10100 [0]. So the first lobe of the camshaft would come around and the solenoid would be in it's marking position (1) so the 1st bail would be selected. The second lobe would come around a few milliseconds later and the solenoid would be in it's spacing position (0) and the 2nd bail would NOT be selected. A few milliseconds later the third lobe would come around and the solenoid would be in it's marking position (1) so the 3rd bail would be selected. This would continue for the next two bits (spacing) and then the stop bit would arrive and the machine would use the values stored in the bails to print the letter H and/or punch an H (10100) into the paper tape.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug5lUI-hs3s
Ever wonder why carriage return and line feed are different codes in Baudot, ASCII, and Unicode? It's because Teletypes needed the time to physically move the printing carriage back to column 1. Operators were trained to hit CR CR LF in case the Teletype at the other end was a little slow in returning from column 80 so the next line would start in column 1.
[0] Assuming you were in Letters. Because you only had 5 bits, alphabetic (Letters) and numbers/symbols (Figures) were alternately selected by 11111 and 11011. So 10100 could produce either an H or a # depending on whether you were in Letters or Figures mode.
> The Globus INK is a remarkable piece of machinery, an analog computer that calculates orbits through an intricate system of gears, cams, and differentials. It provided astronauts with a high-resolution, full-color display of the spacecraft's position, way beyond what an electronic space computer could provide in the 1960s. If nothing else, at least skim through this article to see the photos. It really was quite a…
Analog computers have such an elegance to them. I've wondered if we'll ever seen them return for specialized purposes, outside of music.
For someone who grew up with the internet the fact this is mechanical blows my mind.
For someone who grew up with the internet the fact this is mechanical blows my mind.
> The Globus INK is a remarkable piece of machinery, an analog computer that calculates orbits through an intricate system of gears, cams, and differentials. It provided astronauts with a high-resolution, full-color display of the spacecraft's position, way beyond what an electronic space computer could provide in the 1960s. If nothing else, at least skim through this article to see the photos. It really was quite a…
Analog computers have such an elegance to them. I've wondered if we'll ever seen them return for specialized purposes, outside of music.