Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
its a stupid slide rule with a stupid carnival wheel attachment.
A computer is a device that can compute. The E6-B qualifies.
Modern usage has co-opted the term to refer to an electronic device that computes. But computers pre-date the electronic age.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
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.
In TOS, Dr. McCoy once used a "white sound" device to mask the heartbeats of the people on the bridge, so as to isolate the heartbeat of Finney in Engineering. It's easy to see that the prop was just a Shure microphone.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
A computer is a device that can compute...
Using that definition my hand is a computer also...
Only if it's connected to a brain.
[*crickets*]
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
I'm not sure simulating the motion of s steam-piston qualifies as computing. The "result" is much closer to the elementary school volcano for science class.
You could be. Computer used to be a job title.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
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.
it's not like arithmetic has changed over 75 years.
...with the exception of Common Core, where "1 plus 1 equals fish, because bananas can't moonwalk."
This space unintentionally left blank.
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
You're supposed to use your E6-B before you get in the cockpit, so GPS and VOR won't be much help.
Remember "plan your flight, fly your plan?"
I did a long cross-country flight (Waterloo-Denver and back, with fuel and customs stops each way) solo, in a Cessna 172-RG, with almost nothing but E6-B and paper maps (pre GPS). I did have dual VORs and RDF, but for fun I mostly tracked straightline (rather than VOR to VOR) using the angles to two different VORs to get my position. (Well, that and looking out the windows.)
Neither a VOR nor a GPS will figure your crab angle for you, you have to know the wind speed and direction.
-- Alastair
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!
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......