<OT> Re: More about sidux

[Leon Goldstein]

Chong Yu Meng wrote:

> <snip>
>
>Hi Leon,
>
>It scares me how much I understand of what you wrote about. I trained
>with the AR15, then the M16, and only finished my reserve military
>service (sort of) last year. I am familiar with the hasty sling, though
>we never called it that.
>
>I think I've also said on this list before that I am surprised at the
>number of ex-military folks here. On the surface, it seems highly
>unlikely that Linux and military service would mix (most Unix folks I
>know are pasty white, overweight and bearded). And I think there is
>nothing more different than working the command line, and assuming
>command in the field. 
>
>How do you guys reconcile these two experiences? ;)
>
>Regards,
>pascal chong
> 
>
>  
>
It is quite likely that military veterans who served in the 50's onwards 
had experience working with computers, well before the PC era.  Anyone 
who served in artillery, both field and air-defense, e.g. Nike Hercules, 
HAWK,  was  working in a computer-dependent environment.

When I was at Fort Sill for  the field artillery officer course (FAOC) I 
was trained on FADAC
http://ftp.arl.army.mil/~mike/comphist/61ordnance/chap6.html
and a few years later I got some orientation on TACFIRE
http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:jVYxWyBxkjkJ:sill-www.army.mil/famag/1979/MAY_JUN_1979/MAY_JUN_1979_PAGES_54_57.pdf+fadac+%2B+tacfire&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=us

I wound up working with artillery guided missiles: Sergeant and Pershing 
1a.  I was thoroughly trained on using the computers that programmed the 
ballistics and conducted the diagnostics and countdown of these 
missiles.  That is when I first encountered terms like "bug" and GIGO 
(garbage in; garbage out) and learned to decipher error codes in hex. 

The Pershing missile was programmed by a Burroughs system.  It was 
programmed from mylar punched-tape in an optical reader, and you loaded 
different programs for diagnostics and targeting.  The computer 
operators were trained in the rudiments, as were we officers, but the 
technical warrant officers were the ones who could convert octal and 
hexadecimal in their heads.

By the time I left active service PC's running DOS were quite common, I 
got the hang of DOS quickly, and my skill in editing config.sys and 
autoexec.bat kept me busy.  Fortunately for me I was out of there before 
the current laptop Power Point craze set in. 



-- 
Leon A. Goldstein

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