When I worked at Lockheed (as an IBM'er) in the early '60s we were tracking
military satellites with 256 channels of data. We had a real time clock
interfaced to an IBM 7094 to support timestamped tracking of the flight data.
As I recollect, the satellite(s) themselves had a real time clock. Since
this was a classified project I don't have any documentation to back up my
recollections.
The SAGE system from that era also used real time clocks.
I suspect that the tracking computers for the Apollo missions had a similar
setup to ours at Lockheed. I do have some of the listings of the Apollo
onboard computer software - and I'd be very surprised not to find a real time
clock being referenced.
Lyle
--
Lyle Bickley
Bickley Consulting West Inc.
http://bickleywest.com
"Black holes are where God is dividing by zero"
Received on Mon Aug 02 2004 - 21:54:08 BST