January 16th, 2012 by Benj Edwards
A U.S. Airman types in coordinates while designing a weaponized golf course.
[ From Family and Home Office Computing, November 1987, p.39 ]
Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you served in the military (any country)? If so, did you use computers as part of your service?
This entry was posted
on Monday, January 16th, 2012 at 1:56 pm and is filed under Computer History, Regular Features, Retro Scan of the Week, Technology Commentary, Vintage Computing.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
A U.S. Airman types in coordinates while designing a weaponized golf course.
January 17th, 2012 at 1:17 pm
US Navy, 1997-2001. We used a special pack of Microsoft Flight Simulator to learn the local course rules in Corpus Christi, TX, when I was learning to be a pilot. After that, basically just had to use MS Access a lot to maintain budget data for my unit.
January 17th, 2012 at 1:44 pm
One time I got drunk and was tricked into signing a 3-year contract to be a mercenary fighter pilot for some weird middle eastern guys. They usually used Power Point for our mission briefings.
January 17th, 2012 at 3:18 pm
This is the story of the development of that package, it actually saved a lot of money. http://www.baseops.net/flightsimulators/
January 22nd, 2012 at 5:02 pm
20 years in the U.S. Air Force, 1981-2001. Used computerized test stations to diagnose and repair aircraft electronics. Used desktop computers to maintain component history databases. Later used a networked MS Access database to track aircraft status and locations. Also PCs for email communications as well as writing reports. In the early 80s computers were scarce, maybe just a handful per squadron. Our supply had them as well as the orderly room. By the late 90s there was a computer on nearly every desk.
January 31st, 2012 at 9:23 am
26 years and counting. Used Univacs and Sperrys (UTS-40s, Sperry 1100, UTS700, MARTs/MATEs), ran a Banyan VINES LAN (even got certified as a BCA). Hung up Synoptic switches, powered on DPC-40s ($1000 for a used 1MB memory module), used/maintained SARAH AUTODIN terminals, installed/maintain Zenith Z-100s, Z-248s, Unisys 3256s (16 SIMM slots!).
Ah, the good ol’ days…
April 6th, 2012 at 1:45 pm
Been in both the Army National Guard and worked as a Navy contractor.
Army-side, everything is comparable to civilian-side. Windows workstations and servers, lot of VMWare, Cisco and HP networking gear. Only thing really military-specific is mostly your WAN link (whether satellite connections using FDMA and TDMA modems running embedded QNX OS or high capacity line-of-site radio links using more esoteric legacy hardware).
Navy was much the same. Only weird and wonky thing I ever encountered was a box made to emulate a DEC PDP-11. Unfortunately, only heard of it in a meeting with an engineering group but never got to lay hands on it.