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Posted by Mike Rivers on 04/22/06 12:30
Romeo Rondeau wrote:
> Have you ever read "All you need is ears" by George Martin?
> He tells about when he first started at EMI, they used to have a big
> incubator in the control room to keep the disks warm. They had a tape
> machine in the corner collecting dust... it took a few years before anybody
> would trust them. They would only cut to disk, after a while they used tape
> as a backup, then eventually they would cut to tape.
When I worked for the Naval Oceanographic Office in the
pre-minicomputer days, we had a data logging system for an underwater
sensor package. There were four sensors (depth, temperature, sound
velocity, salinity) each of which produced a sine wave with the
frequency proportional to the parameter value. Each sensor got its own
audio band, the four audio frequencies were mixed together, and sent up
from the bottom of the ocean through about five miles of cable. On the
surface, four bandpass filters separated the transducer outputs, and
each was fed to a digital frequency counter. The digital outputs of the
conuters were fed sequentially to a paper tape punch for logging. The
paper tape was then fed into a Teletype printer to get a hard copy of
the data.
I put together a system for a new ship using a newfangled Hewlett
Packakard 9300 (I think) programmable calculator connected by HP-IB to
a new counter. The calculator part let me put in calibration data for
the sensors so that the parameter values could be read read out and
recorded directly, the data could be plotted, and a whole cruise's
worth of data could be stored on a single cassette. They took it out
and used it, but in parallel with the paper tape system. It took a few
years before they stopped using the paper tape, however. Seems like the
chief scientists (who were mostly chemists, not engineers) liked the
tape because they could see by the holes in the paper that it was
acutally working.
I still have one of those cassettes. I wonder if it will still play.
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