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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.
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.
Windows is 30 years old, and still in use. Hard to imagine that Windows 95 was far closer to Windows 1.0 than today.
Windows 3.11 was the most popular of that series of Windows. I retired a 3.11 system IIRC about 5 or so years ago, but the old lady who owned it used it for word processing and that was about it. It wasn't on the net, it didn't even have an IP stack, it had nothing else installed and she saved everything to floppies, even though it had a hard drive. I was amazed it even functioned.
Out of curiosity, I timed it go from power down to DOS 6.? to Win 3.11 UI in 17 seconds and to MS word within 34 seconds. Obviously systems do a lot more things when they start up now, but still pretty much shows it alligned with peoples expectations of how long it should take a computer to be ready to use after you turn it on.
Happy New Year /.rs
My ism, it's full of beliefs.