Posted on 08/17/2016 10:29:43 AM PDT by zeugma
NO problem....in my old fart zeal for remembering the old days, I neglected to even notice the DOS reference. My bad. :0)
You might not be aware, but aircraft landing systems that locate the aircraft on the center of the runway use that same system to modulate an RF signal that is received by the aircraft from transmitters on either side of the runway.
It’s been a long time, but IIRC, the tones are 120 and 90 Hz. Too far to one side and you get solid freq of one or the other. Right down the middle you get the mixture of the two at equal amplitudes...........
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_landing_system
Loved the TRS-80 at the time, but when I saw the Apple II, I was just awestruck by it's awesomeness. Couldn't afford one in those days. Also couldn't afford the TRS-80. I had made friends with the manager of the local Radio Shack and he let me diddle with their display model to my heart's content.
My own computer was a Quest "Super Elf."
Trying to get every available byte of available memory for programs to run was an art. I had multiple config.sys files that I'd use for different purposes. That's one of the uses of 'warm.com' for me. I had written a batch file that would (among other things) bring up a list of configs for specific purposes I'd select the one I wanted, and it would copy it into place then reboot.
I also had a really hairy AT command sequence I tweaked for a long time to get every bit of speed possible out of my modem. Thank God I don't need anything like that anymore.
Psshhh, youngster, I was doin stuff like that on my Apple II+. Hand coded assembly language, I swear it felt as fast as anything operating today.
I remember about that.
Of course the pilot doesn’t hear any of this. All he sees is a meter with a cross on it, indicating his position relative to the runway...............hopefully...........
IIRC that is a scheme in flying infrastructure that goes back to near barnstorming days.
Well, yes but once i found out how to break-in to it, it got really boring.
:: The tool was called a ‘chicken plucker ::
Dude...that’s nasty!!
OK
you win!
Meh. you Apple guys...
Remember when you had to worry about filling up your hard drive? Ha, I don’t even think about it any more, and I do quite a bit of photoshop work.
Knuth's dedicates his opus to one and the same, inspired his instructional MIX computer.
You must be in telecom....wireless for mobile phones and base towers, huh?
Have you ever heard the term -153 DBC?
Zero Noise Figure...............
I worked on those, among others. Back in the day, I did a lot of MVS and JCL work. I wrote specialized JES (basically job-entry-system) exits in assembler language to control how the mainframe interpreted JCL cards (job-control-language). I customized JES exits with back doors to scan for my jobs, and give them highest priority to run on the mainframe (hee-hee). Co-workers were mystified how I got immediate turnaround on running my jobs. I checked many years later, and my code was still running.
My first was a MITS ALTAIR. Mrs. C shipped it to me while I was stationed in a wonderful southwest Asian locale. Soldered it together, hooked it to a model 45? teletype and it typed an ampersand on the paper(or was it a pound sign). 100 baud current loop, more or less morse code. Billy’s less interesting brother Jimmah was POTUS then.
We left it at the embassy. Back home I bought a SWTPC kit and started over in the Motorola world, 6800 then 6809. FLEX was the OS for those machines.
Back then KILOBAUD was the magazine to read. There are several dozen of them at the place in Ennis.
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