27 Feb
2002
27 Feb
'02
5:17 p.m.
--- Tom Leffingwell <tom(a)sba.miami.edu> wrote:
...I work for a university on a National Science
Foundation funded
project that provides satellite communication to scientists at the
geographic south pole...
Funny we should meet here... I've personally benefited from your work...
I worked at McMurdo from 1995 through 1997, and was at Pole for week
at the end of the 1995-1996 season. Among other things, I rebuilt
the SPARC5 that they used for burning CD-ROMs.
That's good for us, because at geostationary
orbit, you can only see down
to about 80 degrees south. With the drift, you can see the poles for
about 6 hours a day.
Yep... for the rest of the audience, the satellite comms at McMurdo (78S)
use a dish that's only pointed a few degrees above parallel with the
earth... they had to excavate in front of the disk so it could tip that
far down - the stand was designed for temperate latitudes.
(usually the sun). If you were in the 1970s and
wanted to design a
reliable "portable" computing system for each launch site required around
the world, what would you use? You guessed it, a PDP-11. The software
was on an RX02 along with RT-11...
I would love to help you with your work, but I'm not sure how. I do not
own a Qbus SCSI controller, but I have programmed under RT-11
professionally (as have others here) and I do have a pile of Qbus stuff
(as do others here). I'll drop you a note off-line.
-ethan
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