> avoid being transferred to Colorado Springs to work on their networking problems.
Well, all the cool kids were apparently doing "Deep space radar telemetry" :)
> avoid being transferred to Colorado Springs to work on their networking problems.
Well, all the cool kids were apparently doing "Deep space radar telemetry" :)
> Well, all the cool kids were apparently doing "Deep space radar telemetry" :)
(Those guys were around. I worked at a location in Silicon Valley which had a 20 meter steerable dish in the parking lot, the prototype for others around the world.
The Colorado Springs guys were trying to migrate off the DEC PDP-11 to some kind of microprocessor. The PDP-11 (16 bit address space) was very popular with the USAF/intel crowd. Making add-ons and plugging them into the bus was a fully documented and supported procedure, not a hack. DEC sold all the parts needed for that. The usual setup was one or more PDP-11 machines connected via a custom interface to something exotic. In the early 1980s, it was time to go to a microprocessor. But what?
They picked the Zilog Z-8000 [1], because it was the closest thing to a PDP-11. That turned out to be a dead end, but the aerospace company was already building custom interface hardware that talked to it, so they were stuck for the duration of separate projects. Did not end well. At one point I did get TCP/IP onto a pair of Z-8000 based Oynx machines, which were for a brief period the lowest cost UNIX boxes.)
“Deep-space radar telemetry is the cover story used by Captain Samantha Carter, and presumably the other members of Stargate Command, as a cover for their actual duties within Cheyenne Mountain.”
:D
Ha! Didn't know that was a Stargate thing. I've only seen a few episodes.
It's a real-world thing, which is probably where the Stargate writers got it. Precise satellite positions used to be determined by ground stations sending up a pseudorandom stream to an analog transponder and correlating the returned signal to get a delay. Multiple stations give you accurate positions. The USAF had about a dozen stations worldwide for that, and pictures of the locations, from Arctic to tropical island, were a common wall decoration where I worked. Central control was at the now-demolished Blue Cube [1] at Moffett Field in Silicon Valley back then, and moved out to Colorado Springs decades ago.
It's like GPS in reverse. Satellites of that era were rather dumb. The satellite end used is pure analog. The clocks and compute were on the ground. Satellites were told what to do in great detail by the ground, via a labor-intensive process which looked way too much like 1960s NASA well into the 1980s.
Today, Starlink satellites are semi-autonomous. They're kicked off the booster and mostly figure out by themselves where to position and aim. Progress marches on.
[1] https://heritageparkmuseum.org/blog/what-is-the-blue-cube