- Joined
- Dec 15, 2018
- Messages
- 787
Some time in the mid to late 80's we got our first hard drives. Two wapping 100 mb units housed in a rack mount that took two people to lift into position. Remember thinking, what will we do with all this storage. Up till then it was all 3/4 tape and 3m data cassettes.
Back then it was XJ mobiles, key the mic, the operator would come on, you gave her your XJ number and the phone number you wanted. They operated on vhf frequencies, some provinces you could hear one side of other peoples conversations, others both sides.
About the same time as the hard drives, we got two way satellite systems to transmit data from the field. About a 5 foot dish with a transponder the size of a cooler. You could use it as a phone as well, with a 2 second lag as your voice was digitized bounced off a satellite to our ground station in Denver, that was a huge dish, 30 or 40 foot as I remember, then back to a land line.
Our first interface to the computer used thermal paper to display what you typed and the response back from the mobile main frame. Computers made by Digital, PDP 1134's. Then we got a suitcase computer with an orange monochrome display to act as an interface.
But that was a huge set forward from totally analog measurements with data displayed on rolls of Kodak film 8 inches wide in 100 foot rolls. The recorder was a massive camera that used galvanometers with mirrors attached to sweep a light beam across the film. They were a marvel of mechanical ingenuity.
Yah, we've come a long way baby.
Greg
Back then it was XJ mobiles, key the mic, the operator would come on, you gave her your XJ number and the phone number you wanted. They operated on vhf frequencies, some provinces you could hear one side of other peoples conversations, others both sides.
About the same time as the hard drives, we got two way satellite systems to transmit data from the field. About a 5 foot dish with a transponder the size of a cooler. You could use it as a phone as well, with a 2 second lag as your voice was digitized bounced off a satellite to our ground station in Denver, that was a huge dish, 30 or 40 foot as I remember, then back to a land line.
Our first interface to the computer used thermal paper to display what you typed and the response back from the mobile main frame. Computers made by Digital, PDP 1134's. Then we got a suitcase computer with an orange monochrome display to act as an interface.
But that was a huge set forward from totally analog measurements with data displayed on rolls of Kodak film 8 inches wide in 100 foot rolls. The recorder was a massive camera that used galvanometers with mirrors attached to sweep a light beam across the film. They were a marvel of mechanical ingenuity.
Yah, we've come a long way baby.
Greg
