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Back to UserFriendly Strip Comments Index
| A question for the collecting UFies? |
by Pic |
2006-11-19 12:55:59 |
translated from Dagladet, anorwegian news paper.
Space shuttle wants diskette
NASA is looking for ancient 8086 chips from the early eighties. The space shuttles are about to be repaired.
The space institution NASA is trawling the internet for ancient computer equipment to maintain their space shuttles. Here's what they are looking for:
Intel 8086 processors. These came on the market with the IBM computers in the beggining of the eighties and are useless in today's computers.
Eight inch floppies. These are so old that few even my remembers them. They were the perdecessors of the more known 5 1/4" disks that were popular in the eighties.
Old motherboards.
A spokesman for United Space Alliance, who runs the space shuttles tried to explain the case to the New York Times:
"The components that NASA buy will be used. Not in the shuttles themselves but in service and support. This kind og equipment exist at several sub-providers at different places in the country, including the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida," says Jeff Carr to the news paper.
Important test chip
Especially the 8086 chip was important when the first space shuttle, Colombia (isn't that Coloumbia?), was launched for the first time in 1981. The ancient Intel chip was used for testing the shuttle's engines to see if they were ready fr launch. The chips are used for this purpose even today. A modern, fully automated system costing 20 million dollars is planned, but not finished.
Intel 8086 entered the market in 1978. It had a speed of 4,77 MHz and could work with up to 1 MB of RAM. Today's home computers oftem have a speed of 1500 MHz and 256 MB RAM.
There was a time where NASA was the spear head of technological development in the world. NASA was established in a hurry after the USSR lauinched the world's first satelite in 1957. The power balance was put back twelwe years later when the americans put Meil Armstrong on the moon.
PS: If you have old equipment lying around, NASA is not interested, they are only interested in larger quantities. |
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[ Reply ] |
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Coincidence? | by Didactylos | 2006-11-19 12:55:59 |
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Hmmm.... | by Egaeus | 2002-05-13 09:26:10 |
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"Useless in today's computers"? Bah! Philistines! | by bugarup | 2002-05-13 13:32:32 |
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Heard on the video of | by NOLAWitch | 2002-05-13 13:56:41 |
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