A fellow I worked with who was in the Air Force in the early 60's then a
hardware designer for Astrodata was babysitting Minutman 1's (I suspect)
during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the son of a friend now is a
commander of a crew there now.
The unit I have is just the electronics, with no software, so no more
related to the mil uses than saying you have to destroy all 386s and so
forth because some may be used in other machines. The D17's that are
surviving w/o the disks are not useful anymore.
Also I suspect that the programming may have been recorded on the disks
such that it could not be erased, since thermally programming magnetic
media for permanent retention of data is also something I saw with
surplus Nike program tapes that were scrapped in the late 60's when I
was trying to find recording tape for my tape recorder.
In that way the guidance program could not be tampered with, and also
would probably be more reliable.
Jim
On 5/28/2011 10:50 PM, Geoffrey Reed wrote:
No problem, I was mostly working from memory, my
younger brother was at
Grand Forks AFB and Minot babysitting LCFs and silos.