Your (USA members) Government at Work

[Katie Wasserman]

An ebay find by Don Sheperd led me to a treasure trove of documents on what the US government has been doing with HP calculators. Try a search for "HP calculator" here.

I'm just itching to use my HP-97 to calculate the blast wave from a nuclear detonation.

From the titles and abstracts there seems to be some interesting stuff, but it's not easy to get at the full text for many of these.

[Ángel Martin]

(02-03-2015 01:33 PM)Katie Wasserman Wrote:  I'm just itching to use my HP-97 to calculate the blast wave from a nuclear detonation.

Sure but nothing beats using your 41 as Intelligence Aid for Evaluating Enemy Courses of Action (ENCOA) !!

http://Intelligence Aid for Evaluating E...Procedures

This is what a search for "HP-41" yields:

http://dsearch.dtic.mil/search?site=defa...&getfields=*

[Bill (Smithville NJ)]

(02-03-2015 01:33 PM)Katie Wasserman Wrote:  An ebay find by Don Sheperd led me to a treasure trove of documents on what the US government has been doing with HP calculators. Try a search for "HP calculator" here.

I'm just itching to use my HP-97 to calculate the blast wave from a nuclear detonation.

From the titles and abstracts there seems to be some interesting stuff, but it's not easy to get at the full text for many of these.

A few other searches to try:

TI Calculator
Sharp PC Calculator
Radio Shack Calculator

and I'm sure there are some other variations.

Very fascinating.

Bill

[Katie Wasserman]

A lot of this is fluff but not all, William Kahan has some papers on this site. For example this one on rational arithmetic in floating point. He gives programs for the 67/97 and the 71b and mentions the 15C and 41C.

[MarkHaysHarris777]

(02-03-2015 01:33 PM)Katie Wasserman Wrote:  An ebay find by Don Sheperd led me to a treasure trove of documents on what the US government has been doing with HP calculators. Try a search for "HP calculator" here.

I'm just itching to use my HP-97 to calculate the blast wave from a nuclear detonation.

hi Katie, now famous for the very flashable 'Katie clips,' (and thank you by the way, deserving of the Noble prize!--- keep up the good work) ... this is the story of computer science from the very beginning! Don't you believe for one minute 'they' wanted ENIAC to compute firing tables... there was one purpose in mind for that machine, to compute the blast wave function (well, and to compute the feasibility of critical mass in the detonator of the hydrogen bom, and the wave function from that!) This was also the primary purpose behind the design and construction of the IAS computer at Princeton, and for the MANIAC (IAS clone) at Los Alamos. Post war atomic science and the feasibility of nuclear war gave us computer science, period. If it were not for our tax dollars at work trying to figure out atomic means of killing our fellow human beings we'd all still be using Comptometers to add and subtract... which were RPN, by the way, 65 years before Jan Lukaisawicz did his work in the fifties! <but I digress>

Well, hope to meet you sometime, and thanks again for the clip(s) idea... works great!

Cheers,
marcus

[rprosperi]

(02-03-2015 01:33 PM)Katie Wasserman Wrote:  An ebay find by Don Sheperd led me to a treasure trove of documents on what the US government has been doing with HP calculators. Try a search for "HP calculator" here.

I'm just itching to use my HP-97 to calculate the blast wave from a nuclear detonation.

From the titles and abstracts there seems to be some interesting stuff, but it's not easy to get at the full text for many of these.

In the early 80's, a friend and fellow HP41 geek was working in aerospace in SoCal and he wrote and submitted several 41 programs to the HP User Library Catalog, for calculating all kinds of parameters related the the effects of Nuclear Weapons (using the "Blue Book" as anyone involved will clearly remember) including overpressure vs. range, shock induced ground motion, etc. etc. He went through a tremendously long and complex process within his company to ensure there was no classified or sensitive material involved, which was ultimately approved.

After many weeks, unfortunately, HP rejected including them in the Library, stating they were unsure if they were capable of making a similar determination, and thus did not want to accept and publish them. He gave them to me, too bummed-out to play further with them; I still have them today along with HP's very polite rejection letter.

They were written almost the exact same time as the HP-97 program noted in Katie's post, which was obviously widely distributed within DoD at the time.

The most interesting thing to me about that paper, is that it was written within the SAC Directorate of Aircraft Maintenance. Maintenance!?!? I guess fixing B-52s and KC-135s had gotten somewhat boring by the early 80s.

[Sanjeev Visvanatha]

(02-08-2015 06:36 PM)rprosperi Wrote:  The most interesting thing to me about that paper, is that it was written within the SAC Directorate of Aircraft Maintenance. Maintenance!?!? I guess fixing B-52s and KC-135s had gotten somewhat boring by the early 80s.

It was the Aircraft Engineering Division. I guess they were hiding behind Maintenance to obscure what they were really up to.

[rprosperi]

(02-08-2015 07:15 PM)Sanjeev Visvanatha Wrote:  

(02-08-2015 06:36 PM)rprosperi Wrote:  The most interesting thing to me about that paper, is that it was written within the SAC Directorate of Aircraft Maintenance. Maintenance!?!? I guess fixing B-52s and KC-135s had gotten somewhat boring by the early 80s.

It was the Aircraft Engineering Division. I guess they were hiding behind Maintenance to obscure what they were really up to.

Nah, I doubt it. In SAC, the Aircrat Engineering Division just meant Aircraft, vs. Avionics, Support Equipment, Munitions, etc. which were different Engineering Divisions.

Besides, if they were trying to obscure what they were up to, they would have used a far better disguise than that, and often did!