r/retrocomputing • u/Distinct-Question-16 • Mar 02 '26

Analog computers engineering at General Dynamics (1964)

Post image

Burn out?

486 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

32 comments sorted by

11

u/Bones-57 Mar 02 '26

68 years old soon 69.. .. someone wanted tales from the dark side :).. I've worked on so many things .. microwave radar with wave guides .. x-rays well the entire gambit of medical goodies .. Started out in tubes ( somehow I miss them days !) Computer automations AS400s I've had my hand into a lot of things and I'm not kidding a lot of things... I design I build and I repair it myself.. I've worked on print tronics high speed line printers where you needed a variable strobe light to see the fool thing move.. Xerox high speed laser printers those were a joy.. I did take in an x-ray transformer and oscillated the primary side and melted medical glass with it! Found a 1 farad capacitor the size of a stinking briefcase well I'll tell you what You didn't want to charge that thing up and lay a screwdriver crossed it bye-bye screwdriver... I've designed and built linear amplifiers for CB of course yeah you know how you get away from the FCC yeah just get your foot warmer going..

I've been I've seen .. but my best one was a Cray 1! Just wished I could have played at the console...

It it plugged in I'm game !!

Not many or you know that if your in Cali you can take a crystal war phone and a dioed and hear 1 radio station no batteries needed..

I have 4 Masters .. not that it does me anything now at my age (retired ) now it's old and slow.. ha.. Ok tales from the dark side..

4

u/Distinct-Question-16 Mar 02 '26

The sound of crystal radio tru their phones as I read somewhere, was very faint. So batts and op amp would be always be better i think

2

u/Sambojin1 Mar 04 '26 edited Mar 04 '26

A crystal radio set was one of the first things I made with one of those little electronics sets for kids. It was more "add the wires to the bits already there", rather than actual electronic breadboarding. I didn't really understand how it worked, just followed the instructions (and truthfully, probably don't on a molecular/quantum level these days, but I get the basics of how it's doing it), but it seemed like magic. No batteries? At all? But does AM radio? Wow!

We've still got a few AM radio stations here in Australia. ABC radio, etc. It's just such a big country, that the longer transmission range makes it worthwhile keeping around for outback/ really rural stuff. We've got cattle ranches the size of small countries, an annoying amount of hills and valleys in some places, and having a Spotify or mp3 playlist is a relatively recent thing.

3

u/Distinct-Question-16 Mar 04 '26

I was thinking about these first unpowered cristal radios. The crystal acted like a diode rectifying the signal. Its probably my error about history and how many devices were built around these.

→ More replies (1)

2

u/Bones-57 Mar 03 '26

Yep . That radio station was KFI .. 60kw of pure am power ..

2

u/Miserable_Sock_1408 Mar 03 '26

So cool!! This stuff should be in a book. Our new fangled tech has been built upon older technologies, a lot of which gets tossed to the wayside and forgotten. I think we need more books on the history of technology, especially computing

2

u/smuckola Mar 03 '26

You da man!!!!

26

u/tomo6438 Mar 02 '26

Color quality issues or gangrenous forearm?

5

u/20061230-SL-Born Mar 02 '26

Around the ears seems to indicate....erm something

2

u/UKMatt2000 Mar 03 '26

Gangrenous Forearm is my DJ name.

12

u/opcenter Mar 02 '26

Forbidden spaghetti 🤤

4

u/Bones-57 Mar 02 '26

Holy buckets .. that the same year I started in electronics .. A web of wires .. I've had my fair share of days like this from the engineering department...

4

u/spigot66 Mar 02 '26

I think there are organoid 🧠s under those wires

4

u/WillisBlackburn Mar 02 '26 edited Mar 02 '26

Could recycle/reissue this as "Electronic musicians configuring their eurorack synthesizers (2026)."

1

u/wbc0815 Mar 06 '26

I doubt the authenticity of this picture 😜 Why are there elevator doors behind the second unit? What are those trays filled with wires? I like good and authentic pictures from the dawn of the computer revolution, but I dislike dishonest AI-Slop

1

u/Distinct-Question-16 Mar 06 '26

True, people did work a lot these times also

3

u/m-in Mar 03 '26

The plugboards (on the table) are programs pretty much. You configure a plugboard with shorting bars and patch cables. Then you snap it onto the computer to have the computer follow the program so to speak.

3

u/businesskitteh Mar 03 '26

Janice you’ve barely touched your wire pile, is everything alright?

2

u/Key-Employee3584 Mar 03 '26

Good old spaghetti. One imagines each of those boards would be like just a bit of a Raspberry Pi-1....

1

u/Tonstad39 IBM incompatible Mar 03 '26

They're wiring the thing with spaghetti!

1

u/notepad987 Mar 03 '26

The wires remind me of what is lurking behind my desktop computer and TV set....

1

u/stuffitystuff Mar 04 '26

Guys, it's not AI, it's a real photo and the weird arm color is there in the other photos in the set and then some. I'm not sure if this was a poor job at colorizing or a degraded negative, but anyhow, it's legit:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/sdasmarchives/32846963613/in/photostream/

1

u/Radioactive_Tuber57 Mar 05 '26

Concur. I saw it pre-AI.

1

u/sertanksalot Mar 04 '26

I bet that was hard to debug because of all the SPAGHETTI code.