Testing The Atlas ICBM: A 1958 Time Capsule Video

January 19, 2024 by Maya Posch 11 Comments

The control room during the 1958 Atlas B 4B test. (Source: Convair)

Recently the [Periscope Film] channel on YouTube published a 1960 color documentary featuring the 1958 launch of the Atlas B (SM-65B) ICBM, in its second, Missile 4B iteration. This was the second model of the second prototype, which earned the distinction of being the first truly intercontinental ballistic missile upon its successful test completion, which saw the payload plummeting into its designated part of the Atlantic Ocean. This was a much better result than the previous test of the 3B, which suffered a yaw gyro issue that caused the missile to disintegrate partway into the flight.

In this historic documentary, the Atlas B’s manufacturer – Convair – takes us through all the elements of the test range, including all the downrange stations, their functions and how all the data from the test is captured, recorded (on reel to reel tape) and integrated into one coherent data set. This includes radar data, telemetry received from the missile, as well as the data tape that the ICBM ejects from the payload section shortly before impact.

Although it’s also a promotion piece for Convair Astronautics, this does little to mar the documentary aspect, which is narrated by William Conrad, who manages to both instill a sense of technological wonder and grim foreboding against the scenery of 1950s military high-tech in the midst of a heating up Cold War.

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Predicting The A-Bomb: The Cartmill Affair

January 18, 2024 by Al Williams 18 Comments

The cover of the infamous issue of Astounding, March 1944

There’s an upcoming movie, Argylle, about an author whose spy novels are a little too accurate, and she becomes a target of a real-life spy game. We haven’t seen the movie, but it made us think of a similar espionage caper from 1944 involving science fiction author Cleve Cartmill. The whole thing played out in the pages of Astounding magazine (now Analog) and involved several other science fiction luminaries ranging from John W. Campbell to Isaac Asimov. It is a great story about how science is — well, science — and no amount of secrecy or legislation can hide it.

In 1943, Cartmill queried Campbell about the possibility of a story that would be known as “Deadline.” It wasn’t his first story, nor would it be his last. But it nearly put him in a Federal prison. Why? The story dealt with an atomic bomb.

Nothing New

By itself, that’s probably not a big deal. H.G. Wells wrote “The World Set Free” in 1914, where he predicted nuclear weapons. But in 1914, it wasn’t clear how that would work exactly. Wells mentioned “uranium and thorium” and wrote a reasonable account of the destructive power: Continue reading “Predicting The A-Bomb: The Cartmill Affair” →

Retrotechtacular: Rebuilding A Fire-Ravaged Telephone Exchange

January 11, 2024 by Dan Maloney 15 Comments

Those who haven’t experienced the destruction of a house fire should consider themselves lucky. The speed with which fire can erase a lifetime of work — or a life, for that matter — is stunning. And the disruption a fire causes for survivors, who often escape the blaze with only the clothes on their backs, is almost unfathomable. To face the task of rebuilding a life with just a few smoke-damaged and waterlogged possessions while wearing only pajamas and slippers is a devastating proposition.

As bad as a residential fire may be, though, its impact is mercifully limited to the occupants. Infrastructure fires are another thing entirely; the disruption they cause is often felt far beyond the building or facility involved. The film below documents a perfect example of this: the 1975 New York Telephone Exchange fire, which swept through the company’s central office facility at the corner of 2nd Avenue and 13th Street in Manhattan and cut off service to 300 blocks of the East Village and Lower East Side neighborhoods.

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Liftoff! The Origin Of The Countdown

December 27, 2023 by Kristina Panos 18 Comments

What’s the most thrilling part of rocketry? Well, the liftoff, naturally. But what about the sweet anticipation in those tense moments leading up to liftoff? In other words, the countdown. Where did it come from?

Far from being simply a dramatic device, the countdown clock serves a definite purpose — it lets the technicians and the astronauts synchronize their actions during the launch sequence. But where did the countdown — those famed ten seconds of here we go! that seem to mark the point of no return — come from? Doesn’t it all seem a little theatrical for scientists?

It may surprise you to learn that neither technicians nor astronauts conceived of the countdown. In their book, “Lunar Landings and Rocket Fever: Rediscovering Woman in the Moon”, media scholars Tom Gunning and Katharina Loew reveal that a little-known Fritz Lang movie called Woman In the Moon both “predicted the future of rocketry” and “played an effective role in its early development”.

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The IBM 5100, image from December 1975 issue of BYTE.

Bringing APL To The Masses: The History Of The IBM 5100

December 19, 2023 by Maya Posch 42 Comments

The 1970s was a somewhat awkward phase for the computer industry — as hulking, room-sized mainframes became ever smaller and the concept of home and portable computers more capable than a basic calculator began to gain traction. Amidst all of this, two interpreted programming languages saw themselves being used the most: BASIC and APL, with the latter being IBM’s programming language of choice for its mainframes. The advantages of being able to run APL on a single-user, portable system, eventually led to the IBM 5100. Its story is succinctly summarized by [Bradford Morgan White] in a recent article.

Although probably not well-known to the average computer use, APL (A Programming Language) is a multi-dimensional array-based language that uses a range of special graphic symbols that are often imprinted on the keyboard for ease of entry.

It excels at concisely describing complex functions, such as the example provided on the APL Wikipedia entry for picking 6 pseudo-random, non-repeating integers between 1 and 40 and sorting them in ascending order:

x[⍋x←6?40]

Part of what made it possible to bring the power of APL processing to a portable system like the IBM 5100 was the IBM PALM processor, which implemented an emulator in microcode to allow e.g. running System/360 APL code on a 5100, as well as BASIC.

Despite [Bradford]’s claim that the 5100 was not a commercial success, it’s important to remember the target market. With a price tag of tens of thousands of (inflation-adjusted 2023) dollars, it bridged the gap between a multi-user mainframe with APL and far less capable single-user systems that generally only managed BASIC. This is reflected in that the Commodore SuperPET supported APL, and the 5100 was followed by the 5110 and 5120 systems, and that today you can download GNU APL which implements the ISO/IEC 13751:2001 (APL2) standard.

We’ve previously looked at the Canadian-made MCM/70, another portable APL machine that embodied the cyberdeck aesthetic before William Gibson even gave it a name.

Top image: The IBM 5100, image from December 1975 issue of BYTE.

Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip.

Cold War Spying And The Questionable Use Of Smuggled Blueprints In Developing Supersonic Airliners

December 8, 2023 by Maya Posch 12 Comments

Although spying is a time-honored tradition, the sheer scope of it reached a fever pitch during the Cold War, when everyone was spying on everyone, and conceivably for both sides at the same time. In an era where both McCarthyism and the character of James Bond enjoyed strong popularity, it should come as no surprise that a project of geopolitical importance like the development of the world’s first supersonic airliner would come amidst espionage, as well as accusations thereof.

This is the topic of a documentary that recently aired on Channel 4 in the UK called Concorde: The Race for Supersonic, yet what is the evidence that the Soviet Tu-144 truly was just a Concorde clone, a derogatory nicknamed ‘Concordski’?

At the time that the Concorde was being developed, there wasn’t just the competition from the Tu-144 team, but also the Boeing 2702 (pictured) and Lockheed L-2000, with the latter two ultimately being cancelled. Throughout development, all teams converged on a similar design, with a delta wing and similar overall shape. Differences included the drooping nose (absent on Boeing 2707-300) and use of canards (present on Tu-144 and 2707-200), and wildly different engines, with the production Tu-144S requiring an afterburner on its Kuznetsov NK-144A engines just like the Concorde, before the revised Tu-144D removing the need for afterburners with the Koliesov RD36-51 engines.

Although generally classified as a ‘failure’, the Tu-144’s biggest issues appear to have been due to the pressure on the development team from Soviet leadership. Once the biggest issues were being fixed (Tu-144D) it saw continued use for cargo use and even flying missions for NASA (Tu-144LL) until 1999. Although Soviet spies were definitely caught with Concorde blueprints, the practical use of these for the already overburdened Tu-144 development team in terms of reverse-engineering and applying it to the Tu-144’s design would be limited at best, which would seem to be reflected in the final results.

Meanwhile, although supersonic airliners haven’t been flying since the Concorde retired in 2003, the Lockheed Martin X-59 Quesst supersonic airplane that is being built for NASA looks set to fix the sonic boom and fuel usage issues that hampered supersonic flight. After the L-2000 lost to Boeing so many decades ago, it might be Lockheed that has the last laugh in the race towards supersonic flight for airliners.

Top image: Tu-144 with distinctive droop nose at the MAKS-2007 exhibition)

Tektronix’s Ceramic CRT Production And The Building 13 Catacombs

November 27, 2023 by Maya Posch 17 Comments

As a manufacturer of test equipment and more, Tektronix has long had a need for custom form factors with its CRT displays. They initially went with fully glass CRTs as this was what the booming television industry was also using, but as demand for the glass component of CRTs increased, so did the delays in getting these custom glass components made. This is where Tektronix decided to use its existing expertise with ceramic strips during the pre-PCB era to create ceramic funnels for ceramic CRTs, as described in this 1967 video.

The Tektronix ceramic CRT molds underneath Building 13.

Recently, underneath Building 13 at the Tektronix campus, a ‘catacomb’ full of the molds for these funnels was discovered, covering a wide range of CRT types, including some round ones that were presumably made for military purposes, such as radar installations. These molds consist out of an inner part (the mandrel) made from 7075-T6 aluminium, and an outer cast polyurethane boot. The ceramic (forsterite) powder is then formed under high pressure into the ceramic funnel, which is then fired in a kiln before a full inspection and assembly into a full CRT, including the phosphor-coated glass front section and rear section with the electron guns.

The advantages of ceramic funnels over glass ones are many, including the former being much harder and resilient to impact forces, while offering a lot of strength for thinner, lighter structures, all of which is desirable in (portable) lab equipment. Although LCDs would inevitably take over from CRTs here as well, these ceramic CRTs formed an integral part of Tektronix’s products, with every part of production handled in-house.

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