Did The Raytheon Datastrobe Ever Really Exist?
Added 2021-03-12 00:49:02 +0000 UTCUnobtainium? Or just a boondoggle? I really would like to see even a photo of one of these monsters if they even exist - or ever existed. Perhaps the rarest of the rare - so rare that perhaps they never were really made. My speculation - but you decide for yourself. And enjoy!
Comments
Even trying to put myself in the mind of a designer in the late 60s, I just can't find an advantage to this display technology considering the size, heat dissipation, moving parts and high voltages. I mean, unless you had to have something absolutely, positively, viewable in sunlight, like the big countdown timer NASA used to use outdoors at each space shuttle launch, I can't think of anything requiring this nightmare of mechanics. One mechanical display technology you have not covered yet is the "filmstrip readout" electro-mechanical display used in the DC-10 for autopilot flight mode annunciation. This device actually used four individual metal-etched 8mm film strips on metal cams that included a stepper motor and encoder for position sensing. The analog flight computer would send a 4 bit code to one of the film strips and rotate the film until the encoder matched the expected bits. They used two incandescent lights, and light pipes, to to backlight the film strips. The image on the film strip would be focused on an exotic fiber pipe module that would enlarge the image to about twice the size of the film and rear-project it behind a white piece of plastic. The result was a sunlight-readable display that could contain more than four dozen mode messages in a very small module. This exotic, but apparently reliable, unit solved the problem of having to put physical annunciator lights all over the main panel, for which there simply was not room for. A very clever solution to a very real space-constraint problem. I have a stack of them if and I'd be happy to send you a few to add a few to your FranLab storage room. It's small, well-built and very clever! Designed and built by Bendix in the late 60s. I don't know if this display technology was used in any other application. They kept making them all the way until the late 80s. The Air Force KC-10 fleet in the 1990s needed a new message added to the display and Honeywell had to pull some people out of retirement just to work on the change. Not only is this classic vintage display stuff vanishing quickly, so are the people who designed it. A true "lost art".
Matt Wietlispach
2021-03-14 04:20:35 +0000 UTClove to hear my surname pronounced right thank you Fran
William Nimmo
2021-03-13 23:18:29 +0000 UTCI thought vapourware was a relatively new thing, but I guess not.
David Peaker
2021-03-12 16:51:55 +0000 UTCBTW The ad for the Dialco is from 1966!
Sadiq Mohamed
2021-03-12 14:50:01 +0000 UTCI downloaded the PDF of that magazine. It is full of ads for weird and wonderful displays. Some I had never heard of. The selections of CRTs brought back some memories, as did all the video scanning coils. even some for Image Orthicons! I love these looking back at these old ads you keep posting
Sadiq Mohamed
2021-03-12 14:49:20 +0000 UTCThis is such a weird thing. The spinning mechanism is similar to that used in laser displays to scan the beam, but the rest is so complicated! I wonder if they never got it to work properly so it never made it to production.
Sadiq Mohamed
2021-03-12 14:45:28 +0000 UTCWhen I worked in TV at the BBC, we used to send "newbies" to the lighting store for a "long stand"! I think this originated with the guys who had been in the British Army Signals Corp.
Sadiq Mohamed
2021-03-12 14:42:58 +0000 UTCJust a couple of links: The brochure at Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/TNM_Datastrobe_full-alphabet_readout_display_-_Ra_20170911_0159 The Patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US3400387
Søren Møller
2021-03-12 13:04:58 +0000 UTCWhen I worked at General Atomics in the 1980s I had an engineering manager who kept an ever-growing file of various tech products that were announced but never shipped, with a focus on datasheets for components, instruments and subsystems. More than once we'd be spit-balling a new product, and he'd toss one of those datasheets in the middle of the table and suggest we consider using it. The most junior engineer present would be assigned to obtain a sample. Of course it was a trap for newbies, the goal being to see how long it would take for the newbie to realize it didn't exist. This being in the days before the internet and search engines, the poor newbie would first need to go into the company library to check all the distributor's PAPER catalogs, and when that failed call all the distributors to check availability, and when THAT failed, contact the manufacturer to check for a new datasheet and find their nearest distributor. I was one of two newbie engineers in one meeting when this happened. The thing is, I had already been a technician at GA for 5 years (through college), and was all over this stunt. So the other newbie got tasked to track it down, and I was assigned to "help". The thing is, I had been in the US Navy for 6 years prior to college, and the US Navy has a rich heritage of hazing newbies (who we called "boots"), sending them to find things like "a can of relative bearing grease" or "50 yards of chow line". But I'd had enough of hazing newbies. So, under penalty of death, I told him what was up, and suggested he instead "pretend" he had been told that we already had a sample and he had to find it, sending him on a mission to ask everyone in sight about it, starting with the stock room folks and going on to engineers on other projects and in other divisions. Which naturally included some higher-level people the newbie had no way of knowing. Word soon got back to the engineering manager, who then had to chase down the newbie and tell him to stop. The newbie and I were giggling and snickering for days. Even parts made of unobtanium have their uses...
BobC
2021-03-12 04:30:59 +0000 UTCOne of my coworkers has been at the company for 40 years...I'll ask him if he knows anything about this, or where I could look/who I can ask...
Christian Elzey
2021-03-12 00:54:06 +0000 UTC
