Moving right along from Part VI, where I chronicled my attempts to “obtain” Zenith Z-248 computers from the Supply Corps. It didn’t work….

So, now I’m about 3.5 years into owning a personal computer. In Oct 1981, I had a 1Mhz processor with 48K of RAM. BY the spring of 1985, I had moved up to a 1 Mhz processor with 64K of RAM. Wow…consider how long that was compared to now. Macs were still in my future…

Apple //c with 9″ “green screen” monitor

Anyhow, I was now moving from a fixed grey hull to the life of a nomadic “tactical DESRON” troll. The Apple //c was around
by now. I was digging throught the classified ads of the Virginian Pilot and found someone advertizing a //c and it also included a 1200 baud modem! I Watched the ad for a few days and the day after the ad went out of the paper, I called and asked if he still had the computer. Yes, was the reply. I told him I’d give him $1200 for everything. He balked, I fingered the freshly withdrawn $20s to get his attention and asked “How do I get to your house?” He gave me directions.

I picked up the //c, the modem and an ImageWriter ][ 9 pin dot matrix, serially interfaced printer. Home I went with my find and had my 300 baud modem sold shortly there after.

One of the programs that had come with the //c was “AppleWorks.” AppleWorks was a combination word processor, spreadsheet and database program, and I think it also had an intergrated communications management function. This was the fore runner of the “office suite” software packages we are so reliant on anymore. I had obviously done word processing, and had played with the very first spreadsheet, Visicalc (written to run on the Apple ][ first), and also had been doing work with dBase II in C/PM. Now I had the three functions all resident within one program, which, came in very handy later on at work.

While on this adventure, and I’m not completely clear on the dates, I was able to attend the Apple Expo in Boston. I think it was in 1983, while I was at Department Head School in Newport (yes, this part is out of sequence). I recall being fascinated with speech recognition software for the Apple ][ series. You could have 64 voice files per “library.” You would speak the command, then type in the command it would execute. You could interact with the disk operating system, so you could easily increase the “vocabulary” by using some commands to load other library files. I spoke to one of the programmers and found out Apple was employing several Ph.Ds to engineer the digitizing of speech. Part of the discussion was about how we speak in analog streams, yet we still think of speech as sets of words with “white space” between them. No so for the computer. The computer has to be powerful enough to constantly be guessing which part of the captured wave form comprises discrete words, no small task. Obviously, we have come a long way, but some of the extra money I spent on Apple products went to thier extrensive R&D efforts that brought us the first viable GUIs and many other things we now take for granted.

I can’t recall the exact circumstances, but as we geared up for the Mediterranean/North Arabian Sea cruise, one of my Apple Club friends began dabbing with the IBM PC stuff and showed me a program named R:Base 5000. It was a database manager, and you could type in english like questions and it would roll out the answers from the data tables. I got a copy and loaded it on the Z-248 the staff had gotten for administrative work. We packed up our cruise boxes and I devoted a blue and white footlocker to be the carrying case for my Apple //c computer anf the printer, so I could use them to do my work while we made the world free for democracy.

I tell the story of the cruise in the series A Journey into History.

Coming next: The Watch Officer’s Notebook and rugged computers

From Politics of a Patriot, Holly reports she got this email from Sew Much Comfort asking for some help.

I’m quoting it so you all can pass it along, and also take a minute and a few bucks to get a card in the mail to Sgt Kevin Downs:

OK, I have a favor to ask. There is a young soldier (a 23 year old Tennessee National Guardsman) named Sgt. Kevin Downs. He was blown out of his tank in Baghdad a year ago and left with no feet, mangled arms, and burns over 60% of his body. He is a Tennessee boy. Everyone else in the tank was killed. His condition is not good. A surgery to improve the use of fingers on one hand inadvertently caused previous skin grafts to break down, and the grafts on his legs are cracking as well and may require beginning over at square one.

Kevin is tired and low in spirits. He needs our prayers and support through cards. Would you please send him a note or card to let him know you are thinking about him? Remember him in your prayers as well. Now I am going to ask a special favor from me. Would you please send this to as many people that you can in your e-mail addresses? I would love to see him get cards from everywhere and hopefully he will know that people all over the country appreciate him leaving the safety of his home and country and fighting for our freedoms. I love America and know that it could very well be one of my family members. Thank you for all that you will do. God Bless.

His address is:
Sgt Kevin Downs
Brooke Army Medical Center
3851 Roger Brooke Dr.
Fort Sam Houston, TX 78234 USA

OR:
Sgt Kevin Downs
PO Box 118
Kingston Springs, TN 37028

Footnote: This is the mission of Sew Much Comfort:

Anyone want to help out?

Sometime in late 1989, there I was, watching Marty, the valiant rotary wing aviator and Det Officer-in-Charge (OIC), and one of his boy wonders saunter past me in the centerline passageway, wearing their flight helmets, and carrying helmet bags that appeared to have helmets in them. Me, having recalled the warning to always heed the “little warning bells in the back of your head” at Prospective Executive Officer (PXO) school, I called to marty to inquire at what looked to be out of sorts.

It went something like this:

Me: “Marty, what’s in the helmet bags?”
Marty: “Oh, tapes, XO.”
Me: “Really, what kind?”
Marty: “Music cassettes.”
Me: “Why, pray tell, are you taking music cassettes up in the helo?”
Marty: “The training device in the console can also play music.”

Interesting. Never forget sailors (and officers) will always figure out the capabilities of anything you provide to them. I will admit to also being much like that as a JO. Certainly if one person doesn’t, the next one will, and the word spreads.

Me: “So, you’re gonna be cranking up the tunes while you fly your mission?”
Marty: “Sure, it gets boring up there.”

That, well not exactly the precise words, nevertheless, portray the conversation. They headed out to pre-flight and off they went into the skies over the Med, or the Persian Gulf, to head bang while conducting surface surveillance. I’m sure they were not the only crew in the fleet to figure out they had a built in stereo system to chase away the boredom while being vibrated along with several thousand other parts of the SH-60B airframe.

The epilogue to this happened a few years later, when I was inspecting Atlantic Fleet ships for Combat Systems readiness. I poked my head into the Electronic Warfare module of a DDG-38 Class ship, and pushing back the curtain, saw the Electronic Warfare On Board Trainer (EWOBT), an IBM PC system, equipped with a CD-ROM, off to the side. This computer was fielded to keep EW operators proficient by running training scenarios, complete with audio of various electronic emitters fro the CD-ROMs provided. The headset hung close by on a hook, and there was a heavy metal band music CD laying out of it’s jewel case on top of the case. Once more, being curious, I asked the EW on watch what the CD was there for. “Oh, we can play music CDs on there, too” he said without flinching, or thinking. I had had an EWOBT on my ship (same as the one discussed above with the musical helo), and had no clue the EWs were most likely playing tunes while on watch, looking very much like they were sharpening their skills as EW operators. Oh, well.

I made a point of letting the officers on the ships that the EWs might also be enjoying some entertainment on the mid-watch.

In Part V, I described some of the wonderous “cutting edge” technologies, such as a Z-80 co-processor and a 300 bps modem. I paid the bleeding edge pricing, ‘coz I wanted them.

I had left FCTCL for Dept Head School in Jan-June 83, hauling my trusty Apple ][+ along for the geobachelor thing. I kept working on th TAGG program, cleaning it up and writing the manual. AFter some extra schooling enroute, I flew south (way south, as in Chile) to catch my ride as Engineer Officer on USS CONOLLY (DD-979). The ship’s schedule was 3 more months of UNITAS, then home for Chritmas and then off to Portland, ME and 10 months in the new Bath Iron Works facility. My CO, CDR Harry Maxiner, had prepped the ship for the overhaul, by having them get as much material as possible to complete the ship’s force portion of the ROH work package, while we were on cruise. He was another man who thought way ahead. Besides being the Naval emmissaries we had been sent south to be, the work that should have been held off until early February 84, was being knocked out daily. Some readers, if you were along for that ride will recall the installation of extra flourescent lighting in the bilge areas, and the replacement of fasterners with stainless stell ones all over the ship. This project to complete the “Ship’s Force Work List” (SFWL) resulted in a few things:

We found out COMNAVSURFLANT had a pile of Z-248 computers to be issued to the ships. Having spoken to some of the shipyard and SUPSHIP people about the upcoming yard period, they indicated they had developed a computerized interface for the ROH (regular overhaul – back then every 5 years, stretched from 3) work pacakge. We could update our work for the SFWL via a computer and modem it into the SUPSHIP Offices, and we could get status on all the shipyard and other organization’s job status in return. Pretty sweet deal. I set about, when we returned from UNITAS, to convince SURFLANT Supply to give us a few of those Zenith computers. We begged, we pleaded, the CO went and knocked on doors around the various offices, but…the “Chops” were not letting us have anything. This adventure gave me my primary education on “programatics.” The computers were bought with funding justified to support an application to assist the shipboard disburing officers, and that was all they could be used for. Handing them over for ROH work package tracking was a non-starter, and would have been a violation of the expediture of public funding. I didn’t “get it” for a while, but my later years helped me comprehend this issue much better. Net result: Updates of work lists by hand…

I will say this about the Supply Corps. They didn’t just get a bunch of computers and toss them aboard ships to the DISBO. They contracted for the design, production, support and training for the life cycle of the plan. By centralizing their effort, a lot of standardiztion saved the day. That, I saw them do with programs for the Ship’s Store, the spare parts and one other area (I can’t recall exactly what it was), all were raging successes. The black shoes never had the logic wear off on them for the most of the rest of my career.

The second effect of the early completion of much of the planned work was the free time made available for the crew to train for the end of the yard inspections, in my case, the “LOE” (Light Off Exam). Captain Maxiner wanted to know whare we were in the process and I sat down, once more at the Apple ][+, armed with dBase ][ and designed and programmed an application to track the items to be done for the LOE. It was an early lesson n relational databases, but you have much more manual work to do to connect the different data tables. I would print out the report of all items daily and hang in on the side of the file cabinets forward of my desk in the Log Room. The people responsible. mostly my five division officer, would mark up the status by the end of the work day and I’d edit the progress/chnages into the computer. Each morning, the CO also got a copy, fresh as of the end of the day before. This helped keep him on top of things without coming down to the Log Room of the Engineering spaces. Not that he didn’t but he didn’t need to come nearly as often. It was a fun project, and helped a lot of us keep on top of the many individual tasks necessary to pass the LOE on the first try. The same POA&M (Plan of Action and Milestones) tracking program was filled out to get us ready for the post-ROH REFTRA (refresher training) in GTMO, where we were also going to have the OPPE (operational propulsion plant exam) Equivalent exam at the end of the 6 weeks down south. Both REFTRA and OPPE went very well, and because we could devote more time to training, and less time to paperwork.

Near the end of overhaul, the Weapons Officer, LCDR John Taylor, was being relieved. He turned over the Senior Watch Officer duty to me. This entailed managing the watch assignments for inport, and also the officers when at sea. About this time I had moved up to an Apple ][e, but was pretty much like the Apple ][+ from a performance standpoint. Using the ][e, I did another database project, where I entered the entire crew into the tables, then recorded their status for the seven major watchstanding duties: Command Duty Officer (CDO), Officer of the Deck (Inport), Petty Officer of the Watch (POOW), Duty Engineer, Duty Operations, Duty Supply and Duty Combat Systems. I also recorded their date of achievement, from their service record entries, and I had the computer assign a weighted value by paygrade. This accounted for experience. Besides just then tweaking the major qualifications portion, all we had to do, as we headed into port, was put in the desired inport section assignments. The initial printout then added up the values and gave an overview of the experience any one section had, as well as the body count. If these values were markedly different, it became an easy task to move people between the sections and balance things out. Someone asked me wahy I spent all the time writing that program, beacuse they could do it faster by hand. I told them they could the first time, but every time after that, I’d win. They got it.

During the ROH, I had the opportunity to pick up my first hard drive, the first one Apple produced. A few days ago, I found a picture of it, but, in amongst the many bookmarks I have, I can’t track it down. It held a whopping 5 megabytes of data and was about the size of a shoebox. That doesn’t seem like much, but given floppies held 134K of data, this was a huge axpansion of capability, not having to constantly dig through showboxes full of 5 1/4″ floppies to run anything. Cost (as best I recall): $1200.

I picked up my first paying job near the end of this tour, when a shipmate, who had retired, hired me to come and assist his programmers in getting their dBase ][ application up and running. I drove for 2 hours to NC, worked most of the day, had the program doing all they wanted it to do, and was paid $200 and a steak dinner. Not bad for one day of work, but it was a result of almost 3 years of creating and managing databases.

Next segment: Auctions, portable computers, SQL before it was SQL, and how to buy smart.

Well, was it a nuke, or wasn’t it?

Back in 1965, the Navy conducted a series of tests (two underwater ones at San Clemente Is and three surface shots) that simulated an atomic bursts, by building a really, really big pile of conventional explosives (TNT) and yelled “FIRE IN THE HOLE!” while ships were parked on concentric rings around the penninsula of Kaho`olawe Island.

More info on Sailor Hat here.

I know of this, because we used to use the Navy training film to fill classroom time while the training devices for the team trainer were down.

Maybe they just stuffed lots of semtex in a hole and fired it up, just to see what we’d do…It’s called OPDEC (Operational Deception) if they did…

The “Lost Battalion,” the 1st Battalion of the 308th of the 77th “Liberty” Divison of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) was trapped behind the German Lines in the Argonne Forest from the 2nd thru the 8th of October. This would be the day, 88 years later, that they would have been back safely form the fight.

Many sites on the net are out there, here is one.

Here is a well done movie I saw a few months back, where I first heard of the story.

600 men went in, led my Major Whittlesey, 200 walked out. Quite a story of tenacity in a pretty hopeless situation. 3 Medal of Honors, 29 Distinguished Service Crosses. That list speaks of plenty of herosim.Secret Passage movie download

Part III told one story of automation at my training command (1st shore tour). This part is another way my hobby helped at work.

HP 7470A Two Pen Plotter

The “Training Aid Graiphics Generator” (TAGG) was spawned while I was at Dam Neck, because the support we got from the training support sucked. Need to be filled linked with supervisor upset no one seemed interested in getting the work done for his shop, so, off I went to fix the problem.

I arrived at Fleet Combat Training Center, Atlantic (FCTCL) in Sep 80. I was assigned to instruct the pre-Commissining crews of the PERRY Class frigates. When I arrived, we had the course material to teach the Baseline 3 program for the ships, which was also installed in our mockup. At the time, the Fleet was upgrading the systems at sea, and coming out of Bath Iron Works and Todd with Baseline 4. Big disconnect. We were saddled with teaching from “IGs” (Instructor Guides) that were now outdated, and running a mockup with software that wouldn’t ever be seen by the sailors we trained. Granted, it wasn’t a wasted effort, but certainly not satisfactory. For the first two weeks of the four week course, we taught the crews the console modes, which was done using slides depicting what they would see as they performed their functions. These, of course, were also outdated.

What to do? Well, get the materials updated. One part involved the updating of the entire set of IGs, to include the editing of the Terminal and Enabling Objectives. My shop got to work on this, and this part is fodder for a later sea story. The other part was getting the slides redone. Come to find out, the Naval Training and Education Support Center for this function is done by an office full of draftsmen (civil servants) all the way over at the Norfolk Operating Base (NOB) about 40 miles away. Time line to get it done? Somewhere between 6 months and a year. This young LT declared that unsat, and began figuring out how to tighten up the OODA Loop.

The answer came in the form of an (you guessed it) an Apple ][+ computer, with the addition of a Hewlett Packard HP7470A two pen plotter. I convinved the boss to get this very expensive equipment (around a grand for the plotter, and I got him to get us 2). Now, the problem was getting the new toy to draw our slides. Apple BASIC programming language was about all I knew, so I embarked on that journey to create a specific program, where an instructor could sit down and in a few minutes, be printing out a slide (on paper or transparency plastic). The other knowledge element was the language needed to “talk to” the plotter, HP Graphics Language (HPGL).

I didn’t realize, until 1993, the way I went about producing the program was very much in line with what became accepted as the process for developing a functional software package, and that story comes much later. I figured out the requirements, then I flow charted (some of it, I was bad about doing this part well), then began the coding process. I picked a lot of brains back then, the people of the Tidewater Apple Worms (discussed in Part II) was my brain trust and helped me over plenty of programming hurdles.

What I ended up with was a program that asked the operator what type display (the two variants of the tabular OJ-194 Tactical Data System Console were the Digital Display Indicator (DDI) and the Digital Read Out (DRO) type), and what tracks to display (up to 16 vehicular tracks or points). The tracks could be modified with overlaying symbology, such as engagement status, and course and speed vectors. I added “rules” that mimiced real world constrains, such as you could not engage a friendly vehicle, and onlyy one item could be shown as “hooked” (selected) into the program to help keep the display accurate. Two different slides would be produced for each teaching point, where one was the operator’s keyboard of Variable Action Buttons (VABs) to the left, with a 360 degree radar scope display, showing the selected TDS tracks/points, and the other slide was a DRO/DDI with the info from the tracks shown, above the upper half of the radar display. I had to program the entire set of TDS symbols into the program’s imbedded database, using the draw commands to talk to the plotter. I seem to recall that came to about 100 items.

Net result: An instructor could crank a slide out in about 10 minutes, either camera ready to take to the photo lab in Gallery Hall to make 35mm slides, or have a transparency for an overhead projector, all in color (I had programmed for multiple colors and prompted for pen changes, if required to complete the slide). It was, just a little faster than 6 months with the draftsmen.

I did find out that you could have program data encroach into your video memory area, as the Apple reserved enough memory for two pages of display, yet the operating system didn’t safeguard against variables and other stuff overwriting this area, when memory filled up. So, sometimes, you’d make a slide, then go to make another, and the video display for the computer was very strange, right before the program crashed.

I worked that program thru the 6 months after I left my assignment and went to my next school to tweak it to get rid of the errors in the video. It was a pretty stable program for those days, and I got it running pretty well and did my best to idiot proof it. I also prodcued a users manual, and kept my old command updated with new versions. TAGG was even flexible enough ti be used for any TDS console training, so it had a larger reach than just for the FFG-7 ships. The DD-963, DDG-993, CG/DDG and LHA training courses all could use the program, too.

This effort concluded when I submitted the program to the MILCAP program. Yes, I did the estimates for the cost savings ($13+/silde vs $1.40/silde (in 1983 $)) and computed many slides wold be made. The purpose of the MILCAP is to take an idea out of the trenches and put it into the lap of those who are part of the support mechanism, more equipped to smooth “it” up and do life cycle maintenance. And, if along the way, you save “them” (read taxpayers), they cut you in on a sliding scale, beginning roughly at 10%. As the Zenith Z-100 and Z-110 desktops were beginning to find their way into the offices, as a result of the USAF Contract, I had also taken the time to review the programming manuals and indicated I would make the necessary mods to allow the use of the program on those platforms. It was evaluated as very useful, and had been used extensively, and was aout to be used more, then it got buried because “we’re using Zenith computers now.”

Regardless, it took a huge load off a few offices of insturctors, while also taking the workload off an office full of draftsmen using hand cut out colored strips of plastic to make training aids and therein may have been the rub…

Next segment: The wonders of moving up to 64K (!!!) of memory, a Z-80 CPU card, dBase II, modems and a free copy of PASCAL.

Welcome LGF readers. I hope this post helps improve your hope for the future.

Some would say we are disconnecting more in the Internet era. Some would say we’re connecting more. Because of the Internet, we can all share in this story:

From John of OPFOR Blog: Cpl Patrick R Nixon, USMC, died in Iraq Mach 23, 2003. Via an article in Smithsonian magazine, Patrick’s father, David Nixon, was connected to an Iraqi living in the marsh area of Iraq, Dr. Azzam Alwash.

Below is a link that shows you a very basic construct of functional societies: Some go forward to protect and lose their lives. Others benefit. The benefactors proclaim their thankfulness for the sacrifice. Read and understand and know there are those who value the sanctity of life. These ones are the “Marsh Arabs” of Iraq.

Warning: If you cry easily, or even with difficulty, make sure you’re ready in case you do.

“A People Have Been Set Free”

H/T: Gulf Coast Pundit

Also, while you’re here, please consider learning more about the Valour-IT project that provides laptops and voice activated software to our disabled service members. I posted about it here. Thank you for your interest and possible assistance in this wonderful work.

I missed the “anniversary” of this in posting days, as the incident discussed here happened on October 2nd, but come the beginning of next year, the same number of years ago, I became involved in the incident where the mid-watch (0000-0400) team on USS SARATOGA (CV-60) made a terrible mistake and launched two NATO Sea Sparrow RIM-7 missiles into the former US GEARING Class destroyer, then the TCG Mauvenet. Some of the details are here.

Three Admirals are named in the Wikipeida notes, two of which I personally worked with during my career, and the third I knew of. One of my shipmates from a training command was working for Admiral Dur that night, and was present earlier in the evening when the SARATOGA Operations Officer came into the Flag Watch Command Center and mentioned they were going to play in the exercise using their NATO Sea Sparrow system (NSSMS). The reported response from Admiral Dur was “Yeah, right!”

The NSSMS was derived from the successful air-launched Sparrow AIM-7 series, brought “down” to serve on ships as a “point defense” system. This means it was designed to be used against threats coming at the platform where the missile system was located. It was by no means an “area” defense system, as it had a very limited capability against “crossing” (read headed for another target) threats. The first installations were Frankenstein like conglomerations of a F-4 Phantom II radar system, mounter on a stanchion for manual aiming and targeting by a sailor on the open deck, which would then fire a missile from an eight celled launcher, adapted from the Anti-Submarine Rocket (ASROC) system. The system, in this configuration, was the Basic Point Defense System (BPDMS – pronounced Bee-Ped-EMus in verbal reference). It was a start, but the operator, strapped to the send and receive antennas mounted on the station on the open deck, had to be verbally pointed in the direction of the target, then he would sweep the area of sky where the target is supposed to be, while listening to the audible return signal of the radar, which would tell him when he had acquired the inbound target by a change in pitch. He also had the firing key for the system, as he was the only one who had the ability to judge if he was on target or not.

More later, but this will be presented in series, as once I get through the technology involved, then it will be on to the investigation.

Valour-IT isn’t just for Memorial and Veteran’s Day. Our young (and some not so young) citizens, who stepped up to the plate and have been injured can use a little help.

Matt of Black Five reminds us to not forget those who have given so much. There’s the Valour-IT logo on my sidebar, there’s one on my Charities page, or you can click HERE on the Soldier’s Angels site if you feel you haven’t found a link to get to the place to donate a few bucks (or many).

This program, I’m convinced, will not only be a great morale booster to our injured troops, but will pave a road for many disabled, be it in the military or at their job on a construction site somewhere, in and out of the United States, setting a process to model for a long time to come. Join in a be a part of something bigger than you can imagine by helping soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines communicate with their families, their “shipmates” and others in their lives.

Also: Fellow Bloggers, military related or not, please consider passing this info along via your readership. Link here, link to Black Five, link to Soldier’s Angels, but….please just link it!

Thank you for your consideration.

Trackbacked/Crossposted to:
Diane’s Stuff