This will understood here, although I posted it over at Unk's.

When I was stationed in Florida, it was not with the approval of my NCOIC. He had redlined every woman who had been assigned to him, he told me, but had to accept me because my husband and I were guaranteed a joint-spouse assignment. I was assigned to the control panel, where I would give the pilots GCA'a and run them through their missions.
There was plenty of time to fly the F4-E, it was so aerodynamically sound that when it was flown out of control and left to it's own devices it would right itself and fly strait and level. Providing of course, the airspeed and control surfaces was within the envelope. This is where I learned to fly combat missions, air to air, air to ground, and to drop nuclear bombs.
This was a digital simulator, the prized job yearned for in tech school, difficult to get and so far female free. I'm glad I got to work on analog sims first though, tubes and relays, servos-systems and moter-generators. The knowledge was important to have and usually bypassed when assigned to a digital sim directly out of tech school.
There were the usual problems of being the first female, some were jerks and some were ok about it.

I missed working on the equipment though, so I got the schematic books and would go through them while sitting at the control console, learning what I could about the system.

There are always common, repeat problems on any system and saturating amps were one on this computer. The test point for the amps was 24 volts if they were working, I cannot remember what the voltage was when they would saturate, but it was pretty high. The guys would fumble around in the "card" cabinet, attempting to hold the standard issue VTVM while inserting one lead into the test point and the other on ground, the entire time trying to read the voltage.

Since I was not allowed to troubleshoot the equipment I would usually just watch, although sometimes when no one was around I would do it myself and fix it.

There had to be a better way, it took forever to check all the cards.

So I got an idea, easy to do when the NCOIC decided to make a rule that we couldn't "read" have the schematics while working the console, just for me, he was going to make my life as difficult as possible. He already had. War stories about that some other time.
I ordered some parts and made my little piece of test equipment, two zener diodes with a break over point of 28 volts, facing each other, put then inside a test lead with a bulb on the end and at the end of the wire placed an alligator clip. This way they could clip the end to ground, the cabinet was metal of course, and stick the point of the test lead into the test points one after another real fast. When the lamp (little light bulb) lit up you had found a saturated amp.
Oddly even the guys who followed the NCOIC's lead in giving a bad time were impressed. And grateful.

I put in a suggestion, with diagrams and cost and potential cost savings. It was turned down.

I found out that after I left that it had been put in again and approved. The military got the patent on it and it wasn't too many years later that you started seeing them, or a close equivalent, for sale to the public.


-- Anonymous, February 17, 2001

Answers

There is so much to be developed out there, comuters aren't being used for much more than information. The computer in front of me has so much more computing power than the mainframes I worked on did.

Dad and I were discussing a "box" that would dispense medications when it was time for them. Biomedical devices are a good example of things that can be made.D/A D/S so many easy ways to change digital to electronic, pneumatic, mechanical and hydraulic forces that it appears we aren't even trying to try to find out what we can do with it!

-- Anonymous, February 17, 2001

cherri:

You're right about the range of things computers can be programmed to do. The problem is programming context-based judgment into them. I'd be very hesitant to take medication dispensed by computer, there's too much opportunity for error and any errors are too serious. I'll dispense my own medicine.

The general voice-recognition problem needs to be solved -- the software needs to be able to "make sense" (i.e. provide a context) for spoken language despite grammatical errors, strong accents, mispronunciations, omitted words, tone of voice, or any other "noise" that people are capable of tuning out or otherwise accounting for. Software has yet to push heuristics beyond the moron level, and the von Neumann architecture may never get much better at it. We have a long way to go.

-- Anonymous, February 17, 2001

Flint. The dispencing my dad and I talked about was for people, like seniors who get confused or forget if they have taken their meds. The meds could be set up by, say a nurse, and the "box" would set off an alarm, like a microwave does when done, that would alert the person and it would open a container which held the meds. We had not gotten very far in figuring out how it would work.

There is a robot in a hospital here that delivers medications to the nurses stations on the patient floors. I liked to get in it's way so it would have to attempt to use alternative paths to it's goal. Once a nurse told me I was confusing it. Not likely.

My real desire is to interface physical devices, ones that use different forms of movement, to computers. The sim's I worked on were forms of robotics. Transforming digital data into analog movement are pretty simple. The little robots police use in bomb scares are pretty simple, the robotic arms developed for the space station is an excellent example of the possibilities out there.

-- Anonymous, February 17, 2001

Cherri:

I'm familiar with a wide variety of manufacturing robots, and I've done coding for them. They are quite sophisticated, they can handle a wide variety of tasks and react reasonably to a wide variety of unexpected or nonstandard situations. They *have* to, because a confused manufacturing robot can create incredible waste in a short time, hideously expensive.

Still, there is a level of abstraction, easy even for a retarded human, that even today's best robots can't deal with. They are like the chimpanzees we tried to train to drive a car. They were good drivers, but with strange blind spots. When they saw a red light, they stopped. If it never turned green, they never sensed that too much time had passed, or started to adapt to this somehow (investigate the problem, run the red light, etc.) Instead, they waited forever. Similarly, if the experimenters built a brick wall just beyond the light and then turned the light green, the chimps drove straight into that wall. Green *meant* go, read *meant* stop. No exceptions, no judgments, no context. Robots have this same problem. They can be programmed to handle any specific event. But they can't (so far) be programmed to think "something's not right here" if something new happens, and they SURE can't be programmed to do something "reasonable".

Common sense is the net sum of a lifetime of experience, which we integrate in our minds, interpolating and extrapolating as required to derive a consistent worldview. I'm not talking philosophy here, I'm talking about practical things like not walking smack into a glass door. Robots aren't close to common sense, and may never be.

-- Anonymous, February 17, 2001

Pretty typical story, Cherri. Anyone out of odor with the powers that be will never get credit for a good idea.

Pity they pick up such trivial reasons to dislike a person.

-- Anonymous, February 17, 2001

Question for Cherri and Flint (though if I get an affirmative answer it will probably be from Cherri): Have you heard of a Defense Dept. program called CALS?

The words are, as best I can remember, Computer Assisted Logistics Support.

-- Anonymous, February 17, 2001

Peter, I don't remember hearing about it, but then I got out of the military in 1977.

-- Anonymous, February 18, 2001

Cherri, OK, CALS was later. I was involved with this program from '89 thru '93. It was a very wideranging program dealing with tech data of all sorts, including numeric control information (NC) for driving manufacturing machinery.

-- Anonymous, February 18, 2001

Cherri,

Sometimes the best ideas are the simplest ones. It's sad that the people who have these ideas rarely get the credit, too.

For all the high-tech digital wizardry involved in our audio chains nowdays, it still boils down to an RF signal spitting out of an antenna. I've met people in this business who can dissect the precise variant of the MPx algorithm used in their particular application, but they're stumped by a bad "N" connector at the end of the coax to the microwave dish. :)

-- Anonymous, February 18, 2001

A large part of my job consists of puzzling over specific intermittent hardware failures, and then trying to dream up software code sequences intended to invoke the failure every, say, 10 minutes instead of every 10 weeks. This is fascinating work, and often works iteratively -- you find the cause of the failure, then the cause of the cause, then the cause of *that* cause, etc. until you can finally nail the original sin.

By now, I have literally hundreds of these little utilities floating around. I tend to write them and forget them, only to find out years later that they've been in steady use by technicians on the line, and would I please adapt it to this latest whatever (board layout, processor, clock rate, you name it). OK, no problem, let me see the current schematic and the Gerbers...

I'd never expect a patent on any of this stuff, it's all part of the daily grind. If I ever get the time, I should collect them all up, document them, and go around finding all the people who actually need them. If I did, my efforts might even mean squat...at least for a while.

-- Anonymous, February 18, 2001

Wow Peter I haven't heard the words CALS in a long time. As I recall didn't it deal with "blobs" to store data. Blobs have found their way to data warehouse now.

-- Anonymous, February 20, 2001

Maria, I'm sure that CALS has evolved in all sorts of ways since I was involved. Back when I was working on it, the main focus was on SGML (tagged text), raster (think fax only denser) and engineering data. I first heard about HTML at a CALS conference, where some people were giving speeches about the evolution of the tagged text effort.

I was moved from CALS to a warehouse automation upgrade effort, but somewhere in the middle of that time period, I remember reading the lead story in Government Computer News, that the Japanese were supposedly about to infuse the CALS effort with really big money. I don't know if that came through, or what eventually was the outcome of that effort. It was sure big in its day, though.

-- Anonymous, February 20, 2001

Oh, Maria, you're bringing back old memories. I know BLOB is an acronym, but I can't put my finger on it.

-- Anonymous, February 20, 2001

tech data of all sorts, including numeric control information (NC) for driving manufacturing machinery.

Sounds like what we used in the sims, the data that was converted by Digital/Analog Digital/syncro converters to control the mechanical and electric analog devices. Even the hydraulic systems were run by programs that calculated the movements that were converted from digital to electronic signals which controlled the hydraulic movements. We used FORTRAN (Formula translation). We had cludge boxes with which we could input an address and numeric value to test/check out/troubleshoot a system. You can digitally simulate syncro outputs, or output digital data which can be turned into electronic voltages to input to the syncro's. Not only were the sim's run by the computer, the flight instruments had been modified to be run by software, the resistance and back pressure of the rudders, control column etc were digital signals converted to mechanical energy.

-- Anonymous, February 21, 2001