
The History of Computing at the Ballistics Research Lab (1992) - brudgers
http://ftp.arl.army.mil/~mike/comphist/hist.html
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AnimalMuppet
My mother worked on some of this stuff back in the 1950s (though I think not
at BRL). She wrote surface-to-surface missile trajectory simulations _in
octal_. She thought it was great when she got an assembler.

First thing in the morning they ran a memory test. If the memory failed, they
would slide out the failing tray of memory, slide in a new tray, and keep
running while a technician diagnosed the failing tray of memory. A tray was
perhaps 2 feet square, and contained 100 words of (36 bit) memory.

She complained to me about these "dumb physicists" who couldn't understand
that changing a constant took 10 minutes, but changing an equation took all
day. Note well: These people she's calling dumb are literally rocket
scientists.

The most mind-blowing thing she told me: One of the early CPUs she worked on,
you could change the instruction set with patch cords.

~~~
agumonkey
> She wrote surface-to-surface missile trajectory simulations in octal. She
> thought it was great when she got an assembler.

Were her colleagues angry at assembler taking their craft away with subpar
results ?

> change the instruction set with patch cords.

I guess processors at that time were switchboard hybrids, prototypical FPGA in
disguise.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
> Were her colleagues angry at assembler taking their craft away with subpar
> results ?

I doubt it.

> I guess processors at that time were switchboard hybrids, prototypical FPGA
> in disguise.

I hadn't thought of the comparison to FPGAs, but I think it fits.

------
rootbear
I have a fondness for the names of those first generation computers (my Mac
Pro was named PROZAC in tribute) and I've always liked the name of the BRL
Electronic Scientific Computer, BRLESC, which was surely pronounced
"burlesque". It also had a cool control panel.

