Re: [COFF] The Third Ronnie's SDI's embedded systems

I highly doubt sensitive or classified military information would be given to the public, just because they "own" it. ;) Somewhat SDI related side-story: My only experience with Apollo/Domain OS systems was at a defense contractor I was consulting for back in the mid-to-late 90's. I was the Sun system administrator for the Mechanical and Electrical Engineering departments, and because I knew VMS somewhat, I also took on some VAX work from them too... Mostly keeping old systems running like VAXstations and a micro-VAX or two, plus an 8350. Anyway, one day, an older wizened engineer came to me to ask if I could take a look at something. He was very agitated. They had an old Apollo setup, a few diskless workstations, plus a "file server" that actually had one or two disk drives in it. But still, basically a workstation. They had more workstations "back in the day" but they all died one by one, and were not on support so they just threw them away. The file server had died years back, and the workstations were of course useless, but the older engineers held onto them for some reason, mostly nostalgia I think. Checking out the file server, the power supply was obviously dead, so I pulled a power supply from one of the remaining workstations, and it fired right up. After figuring out the token ring wiring, and jumping wires where workstations had been removed, I powered on one of the workstations, and it booted and ran just fine. The old engineering wizard went back to his notes, found his password and everything else he needed, and proceeded to find a few files that were obviously very important to him. I don't remember the transfer method, maybe it was floppies... The system certainly wasn't hooked up to any other network in the building. Anyway, he was very happy. He explained the files were PCB layouts for some old project they were involved in, and needed the files to prove the work they did, so they could get paid. It was an SDI project. ;) Moral of the story, defense contractors were still reaping the rewards of SDI, at least 10-15 years later. This was at Loral Fairchild Systems in Syosset, NY, an east-coast division (and originally corporate headquarters ) of Fairchild Systems of California, which used to be Fairchild Imaging. Bought by Lockheed Martin a few years later. And then sold off to BAE after that. I only stuck around until 2000 or so, just before the sell-off to BAE. When I first went to interview for the consulting gig back in 1993, I was shown around to meet all the engineers. They all had drawings of PCBs on their cubicle walls... they were all round boards. I hit it off with one of the electrical engineers right away, and I asked him what they were. He looked around, and said in a low voice: "They fit into a missile". Later on I came to realize they were working on proposals for THAADS. One of their hurdles was calibrating CCDs for IR use. Every cell in their CCDs were slightly different in terms of light response. The engineer I had hit it off with was the principal engineer responsible for coming up with a method of calibrating IR CCDs all in hardware. art k. On 1/21/2020 11:39 PM, Wesley Parish wrote: