[GreenKeys] [External] Was: TWX/TELEX now: Analog Computers

[Jones, Douglas W]

From: John [John at tubetestingpros.com] -- Thursday, April 15, 2021 7:37 PM
> You might be very interested in exploring "Analog Computers".

A friend who graduated from college with an EE degree a year or so before I got my BS in physics took a job with a power company in Lehigh PA.  I recall visiting him in the summer of 1973.  We had a great time walking the rails of an abandoned railroad yard near the PA NJ border, and some of the stories he told were quite fun.

When he took his job at the power company, his job was load forecasting -- when will it be safe to schedule downtime on one of our big coal-fired plants so we can do preventative maintenance.  Their primary tool for this, aside from such things as weather reports and historical data, was a large analog computer on which they ran, on a permanent basis, a model of all the power plants and consumers in their service area plus the areas served by neighboring utilities.  He, being an EE, certainly understood the theory behind the thing, but he'd never actually seen a big analog computer when he was in school.  They were already being taught as history, not current technology.

And then, of course, there came the day that the IBEW called a strike against the utility company.  As an engineer, he was, technically, mannagement, so he and most of the rest of management was suddenly out in the field replacing the workforce actually running the power plants.  He said everything went pretty well until he rolled a bulldozer over while "dressing" a coal pile.  Raising and lowering the blade involves two hydraulic cylinders, one left and one right, and if you tilt the blade side to side just a little and then drive forward, you cut a helical path through the coal (or dirt).  Oops.

Also there was the conveyor motor that caught fire.  The conveyor was, of course, moving coal toward the crusher and boiler, and there was a little joggle in the belt supports that occasionally dropped a bit of coal on that motor.  Regular inspection (with a shovel) was required to keep things shipshape, but the temporary plant workers (management) didn't know this, and they found out when the motor (and the coal pile that had engulfed it and cut off the cooling air) caught fire.

        Doug Jones
        jones at cs.uiowa.edu