DnvrFox

Well, since no one else except Stapfam is contributing, I will second your thoughts about computers!

When I was in high school in 1956, I had a summer internship with what was then Convair, a major military airplane builder (think F102 and F106). I worked in the radome testing station. In another location, there was a big room as you describe, with folks running around changing tubes and doing something called "programming."

You had to have a high priority to get "computer time" and the thing was running 24 hours per day.

We were doing testing of radomes to chart the deflection of the electronic radar signal through the different dielectric materials and shapes being tested. All of the graphs were done by hand (by me), showing the deflections.

At times we were able to get computer time to avoid the long, long hand calculations. I had a Friden square root calculator, as square roots were a part of the formula used. It was great getting the computer run of the calculations, instead of calculating by a slow whirling mechanical machine that took several seconds for each square root calculated.

There was also a device called an "analog" computer, in addition to the "digital" computer. I don't quite know what the analog was used for, but it had rheostats, capacitors and resistors, etc. to mimic actual objects.

This was a "cost-plus" contract, and I quickly learned just how wasteful folks can be with government money. There were two testing shacks for the radomes on the top of the building, and the guys had wired the first two steps with pressure switches to ring an alarm in the cab. That way they could sleep most of the time, with the alarm waking them up as someone approached.

A program that was designed to turn an honors student into an engineer instead showed me the waste and inefficiencies of government, and I pursued other fields of study.