Computing "in the field" (was RE: Osborne)

I was involved in a trial of resistivity surveying in Peru in 1979, but it was not very successful -- the desert sands were too dry for there to be much conductivity! We had better luck with a simple seismic unit (womp the ground with a sledge hammer and pick up the waves on a pair of geophones). I have a copy of AutoCad 1.4 (that's one point four, not fourteen) that was customized by John Walker for use on the Otrona Attache at the request of University of Chicago archaeologists working in the Middle East. It was successfully used for mapping and architectural drawings at Nippur, in Iraq (see http://www-oi.uchicago.edu/OI/AGS/About_AGS.html). After using the Osborne 1 in Peru, I got an Otrona 8:16 that I also used in Peru. I wrote a simple program for it to take raw theodolite data and generate a graphic of the architecture`we were mapping. I also used a commercial graphing program (Golden Graphics Plotware) to create a contour map based on pottery sherd frequencies that nicely revealed house patterns on a wind-deflated site (where all evidence of the cane-walled houses had been blown away by the wind). We used the computers mainly for writing and data base applications, though. Just having a portable computer for that was a great help, though. We owe a lot to Adam Osborne for opening up that market. BTW, the acquaintance that I got the AutoCAD 1.4 from, McGuire Gibson, and a Grad school classmate, Elizabeth Stone, have been lobbying/advising the US on where _not_ to bomb in Iraq in an attempt to minimize damage to historical and archaeological sites there. -----Original Message----- From: Ethan Dicks [mailto:erd_6502@yahoo.com] Sent: Tuesday, March 25, 2003 9:05 AM To: cctalk(a)classiccmp.org Subject: Computing "in the field" (was RE: Osborne) --- "Feldman, Robert" <Robert_Feldman(a)jdedwards.com> wrote: Interesting. We took Kaypros (one 2, and later, a 10, IIRC) to the dig I worked on in College (1985, 1987, 1989). One of our guys tried to write a program to graph our results on-site, but those efforts didn't appear to be rewarding (we were using non- invasive survey techniques with a soil resistivity box that I had to keep repairing, and a proton magnetometer) -ethan