How Did You Find Us?

[ArdWrknTrk]

Funny, I'm just looking through this thread now.
Gary sent me an invitation when this forum got off the ground.

Never thought much about my thin history with computers.
A trash80, Sinclair ZX81, Amiga 2000 and ThinkPad of unknown model with a 80386 and the math coprocessor rounds out my early (pre-internet) years.


I never really Geeked hard on them, but did use them to get some work done.

[1986 f150 4.9l]

Gary, after I purchased my 86 knowing I had a lot of challenges.  I found a group that could help me called Ford Truck Enthusiasts.  After receiving their help I saw that they also had numerous comments for people to use The Bullnose Bible as a resource for drawings etc.   I certainly used a number of your drawings including the conversion drawings for a DS2 system.   They obviously think highly of all your information for enthusiasts.  

I decided to join your group and am glad I did.  You have already helped me and are a friendly group.   Hank

[Gary Lewis]

Jim - It looks like you fit right in with many of the others of us.  However I never "Geeked" on much of anything. I did jail break an early iPhone, but found the benefits were not worth the continued and increasingly difficult re-jail breaking.  And I did add a solid-state drive and a pretty significant graphics processor to the shop computer, but I doubt that qualifies.

Hank - I'm glad you joined us.  Many of us have spent considerable time on FTE, and some of the guys still do.  But I find this forum takes all the time I can give it, which is probably more than I should, so I don't go back to FTE except to find something I've written up previously.  However, I'm sure glad they have such a high opinion of the info here.  

[Steve83]

Gary Lewis wrote

...the master parts catalogs?  I have the digitized '94 version...

Is it online?  When I click the "Literatire" tab in the pulldown menu, it just pulls down a blank line.  Several of them do that.

[Gary Lewis]

No, it isn't online.  And it is secured such that I can't easily do that.

But on the literature issue, do you mean you hit the three bars above left and then click literature and get nothing?  Here's what I get when I do that:

[Steve83]

I don't see 3 bars now - I see one.  When I click it (pointing to it does nothing), it opens like chopsticks into a < like this pic shows, and the headings appear.  But most of them only produce a blank bar:



This is in Win10x64 using Chrome.

[ArdWrknTrk]

I never got to mess with big mainframes like you and Bill, but I do remember getting on Saber (?) the ticket booking network in the days of teletypes.

So my experience is mainly with personal computers and the internet.
Though some of us set up token ring at school.

I broke most everything,  and then I broke it some more.  
IPhone's, rooted linux.... and Android when it came out.

Built a few pc's in Pentium/AMD K days.
Overclocking and water cooling are hopefully dead except for places like Bluffdale now.
*** 6.6 MILLION gallons a DAY last August!  

CORRECTION: 66 mgal for the month of August.
That's still 2.2 million gallons a day!
It takes a HUGE amount of electricity to create that much heat.

[Gary Lewis]

Steve - That's a serious problem, and one I don't know how to fix.  

Can you try another browser?  I'm wondering if you need to clear the cookies, but don't want to ask you to do that if another browser has the same problem.

I just had a problem with this tablet running Win 10x64 & Chrome where clicking on a link in the Weebly editor for this site did nothing.  But other browsers worked fine.  So I cleared the cookies for the Weebly site only in Chrome and it fixed the problem.

Jim - I hadn't kept up with Bluffdale, but that is a LOT of water.  However, I don't see new PC's advertised with water cooling anymore, so that may not be an option for most of us.  On the other hand, I have seen magazines touting overclocking of the latest chips for gamers.

[ArdWrknTrk]

They're a node on all the major cross country trunks.
Internet use is only going up so I can't see the NSA's water use going down.

It is shocking, isn't it?

[85lebaront2]

My very first introduction to any kind of computer was the ballistic computer at the then Naval Proving Ground Dahlgren VA. It was in a pair of rooms, one was the actual processing (tons of vacuum tubes) the other was the memory and data entry, a room full of tape drives, like old reel to reel recorders. As an 8 year old (probably) it was fascinating to watch them spin first one way then the other, pause and run a bit slower.

Dad was main battery (16" Naval Rifles) officer and when he was duty officer on weekends he would take me with him in the gray USN pickup. While we were there they built two interesting items, one was the Terrier test track, the other, I found out later, was the Polaris test launch tank. I thought it was a pond for fishing as, since it was visible from US 301 and right near the Potomac River South Shore, it was probably somewhat of a protective "cover" for it's main purpose. Years later, it a documentary on the Polaris development, I saw some of the early test launches and instantly recognized the "pond" with the 3 story "tower" next to it.

The 16" test firings would shake the whole base, the dummy projectiles were fired through induction sensing rings to measure their velocity at various distances from the muzzle. This data became part of the powder lot qualification and was one of the pieces of information cranked into the fire control computers in the battleship turrets. During Vietnam, they were still using some of the powder lots dad qualified between 1951 and 1955.

The plate battery, where AP rounds (5" - 38 usually) were shot against samples or armor (probably German and Japanese from WWII) always ran at night since shrapnel was an issue and whole areas needed to be off-limits.

[ArdWrknTrk]

Cool story!

My dad did electronics prototyping for various military/aerospace contractors.
I got to play with lasers and tracking radar but never anything that went BOOM! like that.

[85lebaront2]

Speaking of tracking systems, dad and 3 others were sent to MIT in the 1946-48 time frame for post graduate work (they all had EEs from Severn River Tech (Naval Academy) and were sent to MIT for their masters degrees. The subject matter concerned the partially declassified piece of gear the British gave us when they were dealing with German air raids, microwave radar. They shared a room, and built a little tracking system, if you entered the room it would just be doing slow sweeps, until it detected you at which time it would lock on you. Dad had converted the simple fixed display on the USS Gamble, a WWI destroyer converted to minelayer to display on an oscilloscope as a sweep during the Guadalcanal battles.

I am pretty well certain that a lot of our current autonomous systems on the newer ships are based on the work dad and his classmates did at MIT.

[ArdWrknTrk]

So your dad worked in the radlab?!?!

*expletive!

Yeah, my dad did stuff for Norden and Raytheon and had (little) servo mounts that would track you.

I guess this went into Aegis later....

[85lebaront2]

His stuff was probably derived from dad and his classmates stuff. Side note, when I was assigned to the USMCR unit in Norfolk, it was possible to get base stickers issued from Little Creek amphibious base, the stickers had to be approved by the base CO, a Rear Admiral who just happened to be one of dad's MIT classmates. When my request came to him, he approved me for 2 stickers, one for each vehicle, my 66 Shelby and 63 Jetfire. The Liaison people at the reserve unit were amazed that not only was it approved rapidly, but for two vehicles. I told them it was a family connection.

[ttman4]

Just stumblin round......

[Gary Lewis]

Glad you stumbled into us.  

[ttman4]

Yeah I was stumblin round looking for info & found Gary's Bullnose Forum.  I've heard of it before but finally found it. Can tell it's overloaded & brimming over with good info!!  Need to spend some time looking!!

[old55pete]

I found your page on Facebook and you invited me to join here. The tec stuff, wiring diagrams and all of the other stuff have been a great help to me. Not to mention some great folks here too. I have gotten a lot of ideas and trouble shooting ideas from some of them. Strange, I am not on Facebook any more, But I am still here.

[Gary Lewis]

LOL!  I'm still "on" FB, although mainly just cherry-picking the questions to point people to the documentation here for their answers.  But I don't tend to spend much time there as it can really be frustrating.

[old55pete]

I had to dump Facebook. I got tired of having my profile hacked, what seemed like, every 20 minutes.