Here’s part of a fascinating story from Ray Holt, who designed one of the first microprocessors in 1970 for the F-14 Tomcat.
… my first day at the company they said to me, ‘you’re the only one in the company that has a computer class, we have a special project for you.’ So they took me to the production area and they said, ‘do you know what this is?’
And of course I said ‘No, no idea. I’d say that looks like a transmission in a car.’
‘No, it’s a that’s a mechanical computer on the F4 phantom jet that the US was using a Vietnam.’ They said, ‘we want you to design a solid-state electronic computer that replaces that.’
I remember my mechanical abilities [being] really bad. They said don’t go into engineering, and now they’re asking me — with one computer class — to replace that computer. Now, for a young engineer, I was 24 years old, first job, it was like, ‘this is crazy! How can they ask me to do that?’
But I learned later that nobody understood digital and didn’t want to learn, and I was the young engineer. I have good hands on, and that’s what they wanted. So they they told me it was for an airplane, that’s all.
We do not have the contract so in three months we think we will get the contract, so go to learn computers so for three months. They let me take any class I wanted, [bought] me books. Just sit there and play around with digital and it was great, because I took a class from a very famous digital designer and read lots of books learned about architecture and so I was ready to go when they got the project.
HT: Dave S. Read the related Wired article, “The secret history of the first microprocessor, the F-14, and me.” A bit of fluff but interesting. This part popped out to me, however. The degree to which young people were trusted to give something a shot. It seems to have been a running trend in weapons development up until more recent decades.
For comparison, the story would be like a contractor today, recognizing advances in quantum, proposed such a computer for the next generation aircraft, and then sticking a random 24 year old with a small team on it and succeeding! That’s a bit of an overstatement, but not all that much.
One interesting thing to think about is that the contractor didn’t know what it was doing or how to get there, and still won the contract bid. What did that proposal look like to Grumman? Did the government understand the risk involved with the task? Such a story doesn’t sound like it could be possible today.
Here’s some perspective on the accomplishment from the Wired article:
In 1998, Ray finally got clearance from the Navy to tell people about it, and The Wall Street Journal published a piece titled “Yet Another ‘Father’ of the Microprocessor Wants Recognition From the Chip Industry.” The Intel engineers who share the title told the paper that the Central Air Data Computer was bulky, it was expensive, it wasn’t a general purpose device [like Intel’s 4004 microprocessor debuting in 1971]. One expert said it was not a microprocessor because of how the processing was distributed among the chips. Another—Russell Fish—said it was, noting, “The company that had this technology could have become Intel. It could have accelerated the microprocessor industry at the time by five years.”
… Fish at one point wrote that the 4-bit 4004 could “count to 16,” while the 20-bit CADC “was evaluating sixth order polynomial expressions rapidly enough to move the control surfaces of a dogfighting swing-wing supersonic fighter.”
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