At 03:09 PM 3/9/99 -0500, Tim wrote:
>>
>>The HP9100 is a very nice "personal compute machine", and the example
>>I inherited was once used to compute the original space probe "slingshot"
>>trajectories by Van Allen at the University of Iowa.
> Can you document that?
They were rescued from a dumpster behind the U of Iowa's Van Allen Hall in
the fall of '89. The 9100 and the plotter have Dept of Navy property stickers
on them that could be used to trace usage back, assuming that any such
records were kept. My conversations with Van Allen and other staff there
didn't turn up anything showing that this was conclusively that calculator,
though the fact that he had used a identical 9100+plotter combination for
the calculations was enough to convince me. (Heck, I would've rescued
the 9100 in any event.)
>If you can prove that it's the one that you have then I'd say you have a
>item of historical significance.
You ought to try hanging out at national labs for a while. Just about
everything gets junked. I had a blast at Caltech/JPL looking in the
back of machine shops for WWII-era rocket assemblies. Found a lot of
really cool assemblies, but obviously no complete rockets :-)
--
Tim Shoppa Email: shoppa_at_trailing-edge.com
Trailing Edge Technology WWW: http://www.trailing-edge.com/
7328 Bradley Blvd Voice: 301-767-5917
Bethesda, MD, USA 20817 Fax: 301-767-5927
Received on Tue Mar 09 1999 - 16:55:08 GMT