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The E6-B Flight Computer Is 75 Years Old, Still In Use (informationweek.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Few devices have been around this long, have had cameo appearances in Star Trek, and remain in use today. The current E6-B looks almost exactly the same as the first one manufactured 75 years ago. It was designed by U.S. Naval Lt. Philip Dalton in the late 1930s. When he completed the final version, it was introduced to the Army in 1940, and later used widely during WWII. Today is a required instrument for flight training, and has appeared on Star Trek original series several times, as Mr. Spock used a E6-B for critical calculations.
"Windows 95 is 20 years old, and is still in use today."
That doesn't quite have the same ring to it, does it?
I remember being 14 and learning to use an E6-B flight computer for the first time. It's pretty amazing to be able to sit down and develop a to-the-minute flight plan from departure to arrival and then be able to go out and execute that plan. Flying along hitting all your waypoints at the proper time, getting your enroute crab angle correct for the given winds aloft and not killing yourself along the way was always exciting. Hats off to Lt. Dalton. Your invention will always have a place in my flight bag.
But don't they know that they are suppossed to ditch mature technology for the fad of the week? Don't they know they're just being crusty, old people who hate change.
Or at least that's what the tech hipsters seem to claim.
its a stupid slide rule with a stupid carnival wheel attachment.
I was musing just the other day about a related calculating method that has fallen into disuse, the nomogram. Nomograms always impressed me as an especially clever way to perform specific mathematical tasks.
When I was young, and dirt was still sparkling and shiny new, nomograms were in every engineering textbook, handbook, and reference book. Their demise in engineering applications seems to have come with a whimper, not a bang, as no one seems to have noticed it.
It's not surprising that it hasn't changed -- it's not like arithmetic has changed over 75 years.
Total troll, but I'll bite.
Yes, the Soviets accomplished a lot in a little time, but it's amazing what you can do when you treat human life as a commodity to be used up and thrown away.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I haven't used mine in over a decade. Even when I was leaning to fly it was very rarely needed, VORs and other electronic navigation aides made a flight computer unnecessary for most flying. GPS of course makes it even less useful. Pre-GPS there may have been areas with minimal ground based navigation aids where a flight computer was more necessary.
Its still a cool device though.
Has somebody made a detailed study on the common, everyday objects used in the episodes either as is, or as parts of a larger set? I fondly remember how a painted Logitech trackball was used in the captain's chair as a controller in the Next Generation series.
The E6B (and its smaller brethren such as the one I used to carry in my flight jacket pocket) is nothing but a circular slide rule with a couple of special index points for minutes calculations.
That said, there is nothing "just" about a slide rule. It scores as one of humanity's finest achievements.
That is very little of why the Soviets achieved so much, tbh - central planning did that, just as in China, but it was combined with some horrible racism and paranoia on Stalin's part. Britain ensured the death of more people in engineered famine in India, and it had very little to do with the underlying regime.
As for "human life as a commodity", the idea that everyone is someone from whom you profit - i.e. objectified by reduction to their usefulness in trade - is the core tenet of capitalism. Hell, we even have a profession for those engaged in management of such resources: "human resources". Stalinism was yet worse, but it wasn't because of the underlying economy, rather because he was a cunt.
They didn't even have running water in China 75 years ago, let alone electricity.
Yet, the *DAY* after both the F-22 and F-35 were revealed, China was already flying **WORKING** models that resemble, from at least outward appearance, the same aircraft.
Notice I said **WORKING**, because the US still can't get these planes to function properly, but both models are now the mainstay of the Chinese Air Force.
God help the USA.
Uh and this differs from how capitalistic mega-corps operate, wrt both employees and customers?
The E6B is a rite of passage for all student pilots, but I haven't found anyone that kept using it. An electronics calculator from the 70s is much faster and easier to use in a cockpit, but despite not being part of the practical test, every designated pilot examiner wants to see every student use one, because they used one as a student.
Nope, they just let you starve.
As an instrument rated private pilot, I do not ever recall using one, although I certainly know what one is.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Still have a couple. Vision is good enough for the whiz wheel but not good enough to fly. :(
A computer is a device that can compute...
Using that definition my hand is a computer also...
When Alan Turing did his seminal work on computing and computability, he used "computer" to mean both a human with a pencil and paper and abstract mechanical devices generalizing and simplifying what this human computer did.
I'm with Turning on this. A "computer" is any system that computes, whether it is entirely made out of live meat, made out of meat plus mechanical, electrical, and/or electronic aids, or made purely of such aids. The term may also be applied to aids that require a made-of-meat operator (or mechanical simulation of one) in the absence of the operator.
By this definition, both slide rule s and nomogaphs qualify as "computers".
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
But don't they know that they are suppossed to ditch mature technology for the fad of the week? Don't they know they're just being crusty, old people who hate change. Or at least that's what the tech hipsters seem to claim.
There are plenty of young people who embrace mature technology. For example young Marines appreciate their KABAR, no electronics nor moving parts. Its the most reliable piece of gear they carry.
The Type D-4 Time-Distance Computer, mine is marked as being the property of the US Army Air Corp.
/. Dissent will not be tolerated. Think like us or perish.
Damn. Not only do I have one of those, I knew exactly where it was.
He could be doing calculations in his spare time.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You can refuse to be a customer and/or employee of a business and they can't shoot, jail or rob you.
You can refuse to be a customer and/or employee of a business, but you can't refuse to be a customer and/or employee to all of them.
Capitalism is inherently inhumane, putting the good of non-humans (corporations) before humans, as well as sociopathic in forcing the majority of humans to labour for the privileged few (company owners).
And before someone wilfully misunderstands me: Soviet Union-style "communism" (in quotes because it's communistic in name only; it was really state capitalism) was worse, but that doesn't mean capitalism is good; it's just a tad bit less worse in some aspects (and worse in others)
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
We could use them to plot the course of starships! What, that's already been done??
Just because it has an archaic API doesn't mean it's not a computer.
That's so true. at least the Americans would never use human life as a commodity, buying and selling people based on their colour, having a civil war about it and then finding lots of other ways to treat the same people as less then a commodity.
Americans would also never steal peoples land on the principle that they're just a bunch of savages as well, nope they found an empty continent and just moved in.
And today Americans would never blow up weddings and such on the chance that there might be a bad guy, with bad guy being defined as someone not happy with having their home blown up, in the name of freedom of course. Another thing is that American business would never move their manufacturing to 3rd world countries where workers are treated like commodities just to make more profits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
The difference between what Stalin did and what Corporations under Capitalism do would be zero, short of the gov't stepping in and actively stopping them from doing so.
Under capitalism, corporations are fine with beating, starving and enslaving their workforce, poisoning land, sea and air, really, whatever they can think of to make a little more money. Unfortunately, the US is rapidly becoming more fascist, in that corporations are literally writing the laws they want enacted, and just giving them to the politicians, who then pass them, but the voters keep reelecting them, so they must want more of the same.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
As someone (Churchill?) once said paraphrased, "Capitalism is bad except compared to all of the alternatives."
that country achieved in a couple of decades what took other nations centuries
Your right. So didn't China. In fact, I dare say that even Cambodia did a pretty good job as well as the Vietnamese.
What did they all do? Well, in just a few short decades they killed more of their own populations than other countries could manage to kill in entire centuries.
Stalin, in just his term, was very efficient and effective. Just look at how many of his own countrymen he managed to kill. Those numbers are, by every definition of the word, impressive. You could even say the number of people he had killed is awesome in scope. Not one single other government has been able to even come close to that in modern history. Mao came close, Minh was pretty high on the scale, and Pol Pot did a pretty good job at trying to at least getting similar results on a per capita basis.
You're definitely right. They accomplished in decades what took other countries centuries. I'm not sure that is such a noble goal as to require others to emulate it or to use it as an example. If we really wanted to speculate, we could say that Pol Pot's method, clubbing them to death, was probably the most energy efficient. You could even say that he was using renewable resources to implement sweeping progressive changes to society and very efficient at it.
That said, I get have a certain affinity for Khrushchev, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin. I'm also a little fond of Peter the Great.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
First, let me digress, I have an interesting story about a wedding to tell you, and then we can get back to swimming in full armor across the sea..
If your into this kind of thing - check out this in-depth video of how an old US Naval WW-2 mechanical computer works. Absolutely amazing - totally old-school. https://m.youtube.com/watch?fe...
I thought this article was about the flight computer used in the Prowler Electronic Attack aircraft....
Aren't they out of service? How did the aircraft get a flight computer from the 30's? How could Gene Roddenberry possibly get his hands on a (then-modern) military aircraft computer during the original Star Trek's run?
but that's the EA-6B......
You got it wrong. Churchill commented on democracy not capitalism. “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”
As someone (Churchill?) once said paraphrased, "Capitalism is bad except compared to all of the alternatives."
It was democracy Churchill commented on, not capitalism.
I hope I don't need to point out that democracy and capitalism aren't the same thing, or that one does not presuppose the other?
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
Americans would also never steal peoples land on the principle that they're just a bunch of savages as well, nope they found an empty continent and just moved in. And today Americans would never blow up weddings and such on the chance that there might be a bad guy, with bad guy being defined as someone not happy with having their home blown up, in the name of freedom of course. Another thing is that American business would never move their manufacturing to 3rd world countries where workers are treated like commodities just to make more profits.
Those things don't happen because the people doing them are Americans, they happen because all human beings are self-interested assholes. That's what regulation and political systems are for, to curb the abuses while retaining the beneficial elements.
Capitalism allows the unrestricted exchange of things, including those things necessary for human life, between human beings. That statement can be made of no other economic system. Capitalism is more inherently humane than any other system.
Corporations - those with publicly held stock (ownership) - are a method for funding large activities and protecting those among the owners who have no control over the corporation's actions. Those who run corporations can and have been sent to prison for illegal activities.
"State Capitalism" is an oxymoron. A state monopoly on business prevents the freedom that must necessarily coexist with capitalism.
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I know that but the parent who I replied to doesn't seem to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
You mean like in the US military? #BushWars
Only boring people are ever bored.
Capitalism allows the unrestricted exchange of things, including those things necessary for human life, between human beings. That statement can be made of no other economic system.
I beg to differ. Any number of economic systems allow for unrestricted exchange of things between human beings; capitalism is hardly unique in that aspect.
Capitalism is more inherently humane than any other system.
A system where both the means of production and the end product of labour is torn from the worker's hands and given to the company owner to distribute as he sees fit can never be called humane; it is more akin to slavery than anything else, especially when the system rewards the company owner for distributing as little as possible back to the worker.
Corporations - those with publicly held stock (ownership) - are a method for funding large activities and protecting those among the owners who have no control over the corporation's actions.
Why would anyone without control over a corporation's actions ever be allowed to call themselves "owner" of that corporation? They're financiers, money-lenders. This notion that they're somehow entitled to an ever-increasing return on their investment is one of the more troubling aspects of capitalism, since it allows money to generate more money without anything other than more money actually being produced.
Those who run corporations can and have been sent to prison for illegal activities.
I don't think I argued this doesn't happen - although it probably happens far, far less than it should. But then again, who makes the laws? In many places, it's the same people that run the corporations. Indirectly, of course, through lobbying, campaign financing, and just plain old good-old-boys networking.
"State Capitalism" is an oxymoron..
You could at least have googled it. It's not like I came up with the term here and now.
A state monopoly on business prevents the freedom that must necessarily coexist with capitalism.
While I don't disagree that a state monopoly on business prevents freedom, it is because capitalism by its very nature prevents individual freedom. As a wage labourer, you have no true freedom; you're only free to go from one (hopefully gilded) cage to the next, from one master to another, always a slave. We can't all be bosses.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
Capitalism and freedom have nothing to do with each other, in fact they're polar opposites in many cases. You can have a thoroughly free socialist society, or a completely unfree capitalist one.
And state capitalism is certainly a thing, it simply means that the state controls the capital. It was practiced in the Soviet Union, it was (and to a more limited extent still is) practiced in China.
You got it wrong. Churchill commented on democracy not capitalism. “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”
Oops.
Oh, I'm sure he's fully aware of the nasty business in the past of the United States, as well as most other countries; How many centuries did the now smug Europeans go around enslaving people and colonizing their land and peoples, up to and including what is now the United States?
Every single country out there has screwed some other people out of some land or resources at one time, but Stalin's forced purges and work camps are fairly modern examples of what totalitarianism can do to kill millions of people in the name of progress. For a classic example, I give you the Road of Bones in eastern Asia, where workers would literally die while making the road, and other workers would just bury them in the road and continue on.
As far as your crack on 3rd world manufacturing - I guarantee that those countries are glad to have those factories there, because they are a source of employment for their people, and the cost of living is a very small fraction of what it is in the "first world". You seem to think those people are in hell, and yet they fight to get those jobs because they are way better than the alternative, and allow for a better life than the alternative.
Should the US just go full-blown isolationist and stop doing all the things you currently bitch about, you'd just bitch that they're uninvolved and are watching the world go to hell in a hand cart. Some people are never happy, and just want to bitch.