DMC-FX7
ƒ/2.8
5.8 mm
1/15
200
Puzzle Series: What is this, or what do you want it to be?
18 responses to “What’s That? (47)”
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I would really like it if it were a evil yellow-eyed robot that can wield that drill thing like a weapon.
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Is it an early CAD device with the device that looks like a soldering iron as the input (i.e. hold to screen and press button) to do line drawings on the screen?
If not that, maybe it’s an early Air Traffic Controller’s radar scope?
Regardless of what it is… it is intended to keep the person at the scope for long periods, since it has a cigarette lighter port and ashtray built in… and the rotary dial on the right is interesting… dating it as being rather old.
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Bingo Rocketeer & Genista. You got the air traffic radar and cigarette lighter spot on. There is no fooling you guys when it comes to techno-artifacts.
But it is not a commercial ATC system.
This is a large computerized air defense system from the Cold War era. It would analyze radar data in real-time to identify Soviet bombers. But the system was semi-automatic. The “ray gun” could be used to manually tag radar blips on the screen as commercial flights.
Weight: 300 tons
Cost: ~$10B
This “company-making” sale was made personally by IBM founder Tom Watson, Sr.
Built in 1954, deployed in 1958, obsolete by 1960.The last of 27 installations was shut down in 1983 (in Canada). In the final years, to the chagrin of the USAF, replacement vacuum tubes had to be bought from Soviet bloc countries.
The software development “employed about 20% of the world’s programmers at the peak of the project. When it was complete, the 250,000 lines of code was the most complex piece of software in existence.” (Computer History Museum details)
Or, perhaps we should just think of it as the world’s most expensive cigarette lighter.
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Give all the credit to Genista. I didn’t read her answer until after I put mine in. Then I saw I put the same thing as her! I was just 4 minutes too slow.
Someone must have swiped the cigarette lighter and just left the socket empty. That makes it useless! Well, maybe not… I can plug in my cellphone charger there (assuming it’s 12 volts).
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Oops… is my face red. Sorry Genista. I guess the handle threw me off… and I made an assumption. I’m sorry.
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This is, of course, the beta version of the "flux capacitor" which makes time travel possible. Unfortunately, IBM had to scrap the project once it was determined that the unit could not handle the necessary 1.21 gigawatts of electricity.
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wglass: they do have a Whirlwind from MIT, and it was used as a testbed for SAGE. I’ll post a photo of that later.
The SAGE was based on that design with the novelty of modems, networking, graphical displays, and magnetic core memory.
Genista: regarding the gender bender, I can see the problem. Your icon is awfully sexy to a Texan. 😉
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Sorry, it’s only Hal watching a drunk ship crewmember look through empty beer glasses.
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While the SAGE Whirlwind II computers have long since been decommissioned and removed, the buildings still exist. I work in the one located in Montgomery, AL. It’s been somewhat modernized, but has that 1950s patina to it in places.
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I worked with the installed AN/FSQ-7 (Q7) SAGE Direction Center (DC) computer at Hancock Field, Syracuse AFS (DC-03) in the northern part of Syracuse, New York, between the summer of 1971 and 1972. I served as a computer maintenance technician. Prior to that I was a member of the 775th Radar Squadron at Cambria AFS maintaining the Burroughs AN/FST-2B (T2) Coordinate Data Transmitting Set that was installed at the site about three miles S-SE of Cambria, California.
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