Quote:
Originally Posted by TiMSport
Lol. If you were truly using something that looks like this computer from the 70s I would be seriously impressed.
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It was an early homebrew S-100 bus computer with an 8080 CPU, sorta like this:
...with the cat's meow of a TI Silent 700 terminal as the user interface:
Notice the lack of a screen. All output was on rolls of thermal paper, similar to what the early fax machines used when they came out 10 years later.
I was being forced to track about two dozen low-medium orbit American and Soviet satellites, a few with some extremely elliptical "Tundra" like orbits like Sirius used with their first-generation birds many years later. Keplerian elements were broadcast daily by voice on HF radio, and I had to spend an hour or so writing them on paper and then keying them into the computer to run the next day's above-horizon orbital passes and print them.
Kids these days will never know the pain, since they can download a free smartphone app, point their phone at the sky, and it will show them live what satellites are overhead and in the camera's field of view.....