JPL control room, 1979 - anyone want to do some systems-spotting?

At 10:31 PM +0100 4/4/11, Liam Proven wrote: In fact I was working as a software engineer in the Voyager Software System Engineering office at the time. At that point, Voyager was still a very large project, with many teams scattered throughout the Lab. The Space Flight Operations Facility (later renamed Center) had three floors of computers of interest for this discussion. - One floor used Modcomp computers to relay and decommutate the data coming from the tracking stations, the Deep Space Network (DSN). - Another floor was all IBM 360s; these were used for near real time analysis of engineering (spacecraft health and instrument) data. One system was prime, another was backup, a third was standby and could be used by the developers (as long as one of the other two didn't crash). My first job at JPL (1977) was in the Ground Data Systems group programming these computers. - A third floor was all Univac 1108 (at the time of Sagan's video; these were later upgraded to 1100/81). These were used for non-real time analysis of both science and engineering data. In 1979, when the referenced video takes place?, I was using these remotely from the VGR SSE office. Another group, entirely independent of the flight project (termed "multi-mission"), was responsible for taking imaging data and turning it into products. The Image Processing Lab (IPL) performed this function in another building entirely. I don't know what computers they used. By 1981 I had moved into a multi-mission group creating computer-generated animations, the Computer Graphics Lab (CGL). Jim Blinn was the primary animator/engineer. Many of his animations were used by Sagan. When I came to the group, all animations were done on PDP-11/55 computers (we had a pair, IIRC). Eventually we moved over to the VAX line. All very interesting work. John