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That'd be Karen Leadlay, an engineer at General Dynamics' computing laboratory in 1964. They built a lot of interesting real-time stuff in the 1960s. Missile guidance systems, avionics, that sort of thing. It's a hybrid digital-analog computer for the space division. Analog computers tended to be "programmed" with ***** and patch cords.
The more advanced ones, like the one shown, had patchfields which were removable, so that complete programs could be stored on spare boards, and plugged into the computer as needed. So that's a bunch of different programs sitting there on the table.
There was one of those old computers in a classroom at a school I attended in the late 90's. IIRC, we used it to solve a partial differential equation just to show that it still worked.
01-08-2021, 12:53 PM
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