This is really sad. I was hopeful the Lone Star Flight Museum would take it over. I spent a few afternoons there with my then much smaller kids. It was a not overdone museum where you could explore around inside the vehicles like a Sikorsky S-34 and the not-working simulators.
1940 Air Terminal Museum Begins Liquidation
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Re: 1940 Air Terminal Museum Begins Liquidation
#22The rack in this image appears to house a Texas Instruments minicomputer of some model, not sure exactly which. 980 maybe? Might be fun to play with, but not for $20K. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5e52f79c0260e6... Note the 8" floppy disk drives also.
Usagi Electric is in Texas. He could make use of that thing.
We don't need to provide one man with every computer made before 1975. The rest of us would also like to have a chance to play with them.
Re: 1940 Air Terminal Museum Begins Liquidation
#2320k is not bad for an airplane geek. I wish I had space for these.
Plus transportation
Me too :(
Re: 1940 Air Terminal Museum Begins Liquidation
#24Side note: what a stunning art deco (?) building! (There's a photo on the front page of the site.)
To anyone for whom Houston is a bit too far of a drive (plus the fact that the museum now seems closed), but Cincinnati is not: Union Terminal is another beautiful example of art deco. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnati_Union_Terminal I spent hours photographing in there last summer. Free tours available which will take you into some of the back offices with more art deco goodness.
And for anyone who says "hey that looks familiar, but I've never been to Cincinnati" it was the inspiration for Justice League headquarters.
Re: 1940 Air Terminal Museum Begins Liquidation
#25https://www.flickr.com/photos/blairmc99/55275010559/in/photo... I don't think I've ever seen a manual that expected me to use DeMorgan's Theorem as part of a test procedure... :)
what you have there is a coding sheet for a GP4. a stored program computer, with drum memory.
eventually, the company would call that a 'system design and mechanization report', which would document the math and equations needed to correctly simulate a small part of an aircraft.
note the marking "link division of general precision". the computer was made by General Precision, of which the Link aviation company was the biggest customer. i had always been told that Link purchased General Precision, but perhaps it was the other way around.
i worked in this industry for about 35 years. this stuff was ancient and forgotten about when I started.
Re: 1940 Air Terminal Museum Begins Liquidation
#26The rack in this image appears to house a Texas Instruments minicomputer of some model, not sure exactly which. 980 maybe? Might be fun to play with, but not for $20K. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5e52f79c0260e6... Note the 8" floppy disk drives also.
The 980 was used as the CPU in the Evans and Sutherland Novoview graphics system, part of a flight simulator.
The E and S rack was an 'image generator'. That one was called an SP1. I fondly remember the SP3T as being the pinnacle of that series; the T meant "texture processing".
image a computer display made up of 1000 line segments. that is what you would get. it was possible to buy these with an output that was not raster, rather it drew on the CRT with vector segments. incredible light points to simulate night landings.
Re: 1940 Air Terminal Museum Begins Liquidation
#27Context: https://www.1940airterminal.org/news/hahs-letter-to-city-of-...
> At this moment, HAHS is in default of the lease, and must vacate both the terminal building and the 1928 hangar by the end of June.
Sad :(
Re: 1940 Air Terminal Museum Begins Liquidation
#28Side note: what a stunning art deco (?) building! (There's a photo on the front page of the site.)
I would call that Deco, yeah. My rule of thumb:
- vertical lines == Deco
- horizontal lines == Streamline (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streamline_Moderne)
Re: 1940 Air Terminal Museum Begins Liquidation
#29The rack in this image appears to house a Texas Instruments minicomputer of some model, not sure exactly which. 980 maybe? Might be fun to play with, but not for $20K. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5e52f79c0260e6... Note the 8" floppy disk drives also.
Even if it was free, it sounds like it’s going to cost more than that to move and house these things
Re: 1940 Air Terminal Museum Begins Liquidation
#30I would love to see someone on CuriousMarc's, TubeTime's or Usagi's level of dedication get all that and rebuild/reconstruct it. Maybe if all the technology geeks of YouTube got together they could reconstruct one of those to a working level. The 737 one looks like it still has most of the components....