21 Oct
2010
21 Oct
'10
9:14 a.m.
-----Original Message-----
[snip]
I have a mental picture of a mercury delay being
rocked back and forth
by the motion of a battleship :-)
Certainly mechanical analogue computers were common in fire control,
and must have got replaced by something more modern, but I would
restrict the list to stored program machines. Nickel delay lines were
likely used and drums used directly for executing code would of course
work on a ship too. Williams tubes maybe, and the earliest core memory
machine would have been military too.
In the late 1970s, a friend joined the US Navy and served on aircraft. He told me the
navigation computer for their plane used a magnetic drum memory. I'm a little
surprised it wasn't magnetic core by that point, except that (as pointed out elsewhere
on this thread) military equipment doesn't necessarily follow the 'bleeding
edge' of commercial or (especially) consumer systems. Another person I know was
maintaining *SR33/35 teletypes for military communication only twenty or so years ago.
ISTR the Whirlwind was the first computer to use magnetic core memory, and that was a
joint project between MIT and the military. -- Ian