Can Anyone Identify this (Cold War?) Stuff? 17
An Anonymous Coward was left with some interesting pieces of hardware he would like some help identifying: "I work on the Yale Solar Racing Team. Recently we were cleaning out our electronics lab and found two ancient-looking boxes that, as the team legend says, originated in an ICBM somewhere and somehow got donated to us!"
"Can anyone tell us what these are:
- A Model 4006 PCM Decommutator (big white box, many toggle switches... it, apparently, decommutates things)
-
and
- A Model 760 Hybrid Data Measurement System (little orange box, connectors, no switches)
Re:Decommutator (Score:2)
And yes, by the time I worked on this box it was obsolete, in the mid-80's.
Re:Thinking outside the (orange) fireball (Score:4)
ICBMs usually only have RF telemetry systems installed when they are being test launched from one of the ranges (Cape Canaveral or Vandenberg). The USAF does this on a regular basis. They pull a Minuteman missile from a silo, remove the nuclear weapons, add RF telemetry and range safety systems, and launch it from Vandenberg. If you see a film clip in a movie of an ICBM launch, it was probably one of these tests.
PCM Decommutators (Score:5)
The model number is not familiar to me. Do you know the manufacturer?
I doubt that it is worth more than scrap. Most standalone PCM decommutators have been replaced with ISA or PCI cards that fit into a PC. These are made by Aydin, Avtec, L3 and other companies.
Some of the old PCM decommutators are interesting from a computer architecture point of view. They were very specialized computers that could process multi-megabit telemetry streams in real-time, using hardware built out of 7400 series TTL with magnetic core memory, running at a low (1 MHz ballpark) clock rate. A single instruction could input a telemetry word from a serial/parallel convertor and send it to multiple output devices. It was common to have multiple program counters, with each instruction having a field that specified which program counter to use for fetching the next instruction.
I'd love to be a fly on the wall... (Score:3)
35,000 hits on some obsolete piece of hardware's page...
Someone send the poor guy an email.
Jim
MMDC Mobile Media [mmdc.net]
Thinking outside the (orange) box (Score:4)
"Integrates signal conditioning, calibration, analog and digital multiplexing, avionics bus monitoring, PCM encoding, and many other functions into one compact rugged package."
What we have here is a box that will sample a number of analog signals (up to 32 of them) and encode them into PCM digital signals.
Together with a commutator, the orange box would have been used to relay telemetry signals via radio from an ICBM, aircraft, kayak, bicycle or other craft, to patient listeners. A decommutator such as yours would decode the telemetry stream and some sort of display hardware (such as a computer) would interpret the telemetry, and produce photogenic graphs and charts for the pleasure of onlooking engineers with buzzcuts and pocket protectors.
Although it's distinctly possible that your boxes could have been used in an ICBM, they could also have been used in any other vehicle that incorporates electronics or cybernetic control systems. Aerospace is, however, the field where you'll find most of these vehicles. Have you checked to see if the boxes glow in the dark? That's always a good tell-tale sign of ICBM involvement. =]
PCM, as many Slashdotters know, stands for "pulse code modulation" and is the encoding technique used natively by your sound card. Your sound card is a fancy digital-to-analog converter whose job is to take PCM waveforms and convert them back into an analog signal which drives a speaker. The speaker vibrates, and out comes music, or speech, or whatnot.
Thinking outside the (orange) fireball (Score:1)
Plug it in and hope it never works.
Re:Thinking outside the (orange) fireball (Score:1)
Decommutator (Score:2)
Post link to photos? (Score:2)
Of course, a little orange box is probably just that.
But depending on what the size and style of connecters and switches look like, could tell some of us old geeks the approximate age of these boxes. The reality is probably that you have some ancient, worthless, non-functional, black-boxes. A decommutator is the receiving end of a commutator, a device for muxing analog signals. The pair would use two channels (either RF or wireline), one to keep the boxes in synch, one to pass the signals. Complex comm/decom units could pass dozens or hundreds of signals in a timesliced fashion. Great for remote telemetry where you just need the occasional sample of hundreds of voltages.
Sell them on e-bay, buy me a beer
the AC
Re:I'd love to be a fly on the wall... (Score:1)
You could always... (Score:1)
Re:You could always... (Score:1)
Holy Sh*t! (Score:3)
Re:Holy Sh*t! (Score:2)
Possible answer (Score:1)
It came from Outer Space? (Score:2)
Does your orange box look like this? (Score:2)