Tales of Antique Military hardware
I'm not too sure if I should share this but I don't work in the industry anymore so fuck it:

I used to work for a small company that specialised in manufacturing bespoke products for the Air Traffic Control industry. One of our customers was the US military.

The first one is about their 'AN/TPQ-37 Firefinder radar' system (google it). Basically, it's shit. These systems are calibrated in the US then sent off to Iraq to blow up innocent people^W^WFilthy Terrorists. Trouble is because of their 'If it ain't broke don't fix it' mentality up until about a year ago they were still using DEC PDP-11's to test their equipment. You know, like the one Richard Pyror uses in Superman III. A 10MB harddrive for a PDP comes on a pallet and weighs about 110Kg's. We quickly replaced them with USB pen drives about 1/1000th the size.

The other one is about the waterfall display that sonar operators use on submarines. Looks great on a CRT, but unfortunately due to technical issues I can't be arsed to go into, looks fucking terrible on a LCD display. Noone has currently sorted out a fix for the problem yet, so they are currently on the run around looking for 10yr old CRT tubes to put into their flashy multi-billion dollar sub's. It makes me chuckle that on the end of their very expensive FFT data processors they are forced to use 2nd hand TV's.

Not that you really want some 10yr old display that's likely to fail any minute when you are sat underneath the polar ice cap at 1400ft.

And don't get me started on how many times I saw aircraft proximity alarms going off in ATC centres and noone batting an eyelid, even going so far as to disconnect the speaker as it was annoying them. I really wish I hadn't worked there now as everytime I get on a plane I have to take two pairs of trousers in case I soil a pair out of fear.

/me shudders
(Sonny_Jim Kirkladn has a small penis, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 23:25, Reply)