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Posted

This was filmed in 1955, one year before I was born. I don't feel old at all, I'm a very active guy, holding my job and tooling up to start up my own, but damn, this brought something home to me :)

 

But at least I have way more hair than the test pilot :lol: (but 1/10 of his ballz to fly that POS Pogo)

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qPWguMKGiI

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Posted

Here, age is determined by the systems you've seen enter and leave service.

Posted

I first realised I was getting old when I walked through a house which was being preserved as a museum to show how people used to live, and I recognised a lot of the stuff in it from my childhood... :huh:

Posted

You think you're old!??? I built models of that thing!!!!!

 

I have a model of that thing....

Posted

I realized I was getting older when the music I grew up with started being played on the classic rock radio station.

Posted

*Waiting for some guy saying he went to the opening party of the colloseum, answered by another guy saying "bah, I recejted the tower of Babylon blueprints*

Posted

I realized I was getting older when the music I grew up with started being played on the classic rock radio station.

That's the issue with me as well and I'm just 25. Kinda hard to hear Meat Loaf or G'n'R on 'normal' radio stations.

Posted

This was filmed in 1955, one year before I was born. I don't feel old at all, I'm a very active guy, holding my job and tooling up to start up my own, but damn, this brought something home to me :)

 

But at least I have way more hair than the test pilot :lol: (but 1/10 of his ballz to fly that POS Pogo)

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qPWguMKGiI

I have a clear memory of seeing one of these in person. It was at Biggs AFB, El Paso, TX, and I was very young. What it was doing at Biggs is beyond me, but I remember seeing just about every aircraft in the US inventory coming in and out of that base, possibly on cross-country training missions, or doing desert testing, maybe. The nearest Navy bases that I knew about were in Dallas, Corpus Christie ( I think ) and Yuma, AZ, but I saw a Pogo, and frequently saw other Navy and USMC aircraft mixed in with all the USAF stuff. I was born in '52, and I wasn't yet in school when the Pogo sighting occured.

 

Yes, we are getting older than I ever thought that I would. The world was very different in the 50s. I first felt it when I heard a Neil Young song in an elevator, Mantovani-style. That was in the early 80s.

Posted

The dream of getting combat aircraft on ships other than full-deck aircraft carriers.

At the time, pure jets were too weak, so turboprops were the best bet.

Posted

What was the point of a prop driven VTOL fighter in 1955?

 

This is only a guess, but it probably has to do with 'hanging from a prop' rather than 'balancing on a jet exhaust'.

Posted

The dream of getting combat aircraft on ships other than full-deck aircraft carriers.

At the time, pure jets were too weak, so turboprops were the best bet.

 

This was for convoy defence vs enemy MPAs/long range bombers?

 

It looks a prime candidate for something like bear trap hauldown gear.

Posted

I've been using the same HP-42 calculator for the last 20 years, I guess, and it's still as sharp as new, it still give thes same value for e after all these years! When I tried to find a second one for a backup just-in-case I was laughed off and this was before ebay :lol: And before that I had a HP-41C which I liked better, but the batteries corroded it.

 

In college in the mid 70's I bought a complicated calculator with lots of functions. I drew a crowd around me as it had 2(as in two!) memories, wow! Oh, at the time we had one IBM360 mainframe for the entire college, and to interact with it we had to queue for the card punching machines and then take a shoebox with the bloody things to a kind of locker. The whitecoated Gods on the other side took them and sometime next week you'd have your shoebox back in the locker wrapped inside your printout. So, you made a mistake (you always did) and your printout would be a blank perforated sheet with a sarcastic comment but no clue.

 

If you did a serious mistake like making the printer spew a few meters of blank fanfold then you'd get an unpleasant interview with some department head :D

Posted

 

Yes, we are getting older than I ever thought that I would. The world was very different in the 50s. I first felt it when I heard a Neil Young song in an elevator, Mantovani-style. That was in the early 80s.

 

I had a similar experience about 20 years ago. I was humming along to the elevator music when I realived it was the Muzac version of Joy Division's "Love will tear us apart". Though I am amused when I see high school kids in "The Smith's" or "Led Zeppelin" T-shirts. :)

Posted

I'm 49. As an Army Cadet, I can remember riding in the back of a petrol engined TA Bedford RL four (recently reclassified from three) tonner that we had to haul ourselves into the back of with a rope. This was 1980 and this ancient example didn't even have dropsides. It is pretty much unthinkable now for troops to sit on benches in the back of a lorry without proper seats, restraints, roll over protection etc. We also had a weird miscellany of No.4 rifles every one of which seemed to have different rearsights, furniture, rifling and/or manufacturer. We wore a cheap version of the then army DPM cammo clothing. Cadets now have a semiauto version of the current L85A2 rifle and wear the British version of Multicam, just like the regulars. The Army has had its ups and downs since 1980, but the ACF seems to be doing very well. It's much larger now in proportion to the Army than it was in 1980.

Posted

The dream of getting combat aircraft on ships other than full-deck aircraft carriers.

At the time, pure jets were too weak, so turboprops were the best bet.

Kestral first flight and both horizontal and vertical regimes in 1960, only 5 years later.

 

THAT other strange aircraft designed with a similar idea in mind, the Vought XF-5U of the mid 1940s, the flying flapjack, intended to have a stalling speed slower than the cruising speed of a cruiser, so thta it could land and take off under control from a fantail platform.

Posted (edited)

The '50s were truly a Golden Age for aeronautical development; advances came at a mind-boggling rate.

Edited by shep854
Posted

I've been using the same HP-42 calculator for the last 20 years, I guess, and it's still as sharp as new, it still give thes same value for e after all these years! When I tried to find a second one for a backup just-in-case I was laughed off and this was before ebay :lol: And before that I had a HP-41C which I liked better, but the batteries corroded it.

 

In college in the mid 70's I bought a complicated calculator with lots of functions. I drew a crowd around me as it had 2(as in two!) memories, wow! Oh, at the time we had one IBM360 mainframe for the entire college, and to interact with it we had to queue for the card punching machines and then take a shoebox with the bloody things to a kind of locker. The whitecoated Gods on the other side took them and sometime next week you'd have your shoebox back in the locker wrapped inside your printout. So, you made a mistake (you always did) and your printout would be a blank perforated sheet with a sarcastic comment but no clue.

 

If you did a serious mistake like making the printer spew a few meters of blank fanfold then you'd get an unpleasant interview with some department head :D

 

When I went into grad school I had an HP-41C.

 

I used punch cards a bit when I was an undergrad. They were obsolete at that time, so were a form of student abuse by the department. Good ol' IBM model 29 punches, and there was a duplicator in the lobby.

 

The genius thing was the Update feature available on CDC Cyber mainframes.

Posted

I've been using the same HP-42 calculator for the last 20 years, I

 

I can beat that. I still use, on a daily basis, the Casio PB410 personal computer which I bought about 30 years ago.

 

 

It measures just over 6" x 3" x 0.5". You have to enter a BASIC program (manually, of course) before you can use it, and I have several which I have written myself and regularly use. For example, I have ones which calculate bullet sectional densities (input: calibre and weight) and muzzle energies (input: bullet weight and muzzle velocity). The beauty of this is that I wrote the programs to be reversible (e.g. if I know the muzzle energy and bullet weight, it tells me the velocity, or if I input the muzzle energy and velocity, it tells me the bullet weight). A different program converts length and weight measurements from metric to imperial - using the correct sub-units (so if I put in 1.7 meters, the output is 5 ft 7 ins). It is as quick and convenient to use as a pocket calculator - no boot-up time, just switch on and go - and I am frankly worried that if it ever expires I might never find anything which does its particular jobs as well.

Posted

I'm 49. As an Army Cadet, I can remember riding in the back of a petrol engined TA Bedford RL four (recently reclassified from three) tonner that we had to haul ourselves into the back of with a rope. This was 1980 and this ancient example didn't even have dropsides. It is pretty much unthinkable now for troops to sit on benches in the back of a lorry without proper seats, restraints, roll over protection etc. We also had a weird miscellany of No.4 rifles every one of which seemed to have different rearsights, furniture, rifling and/or manufacturer. We wore a cheap version of the then army DPM cammo clothing. Cadets now have a semiauto version of the current L85A2 rifle and wear the British version of Multicam, just like the regulars. The Army has had its ups and downs since 1980, but the ACF seems to be doing very well. It's much larger now in proportion to the Army than it was in 1980.

Heck, I did my training in -97 and we were allowed to transport troop on trucks without any seats, not allowed today.

 

/R

Posted

The '50s were truly a Golden Age for aeronautical development; advances came at a mind-boggling rate.

 

 

Yup. Only a decade separates these two planes.

 

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