[Milsurplus] Mesh networks and Sylvania Electronic Systems

[Clarence M. Owens]

Hi All,

Lately I've been seeing references to Mesh Networks as one of the new means
for providing battlefield communication.  Interesting.  Back in 1962 or
maybe 1963 I was a combination part time engineering student and full time
employee of the Computing Center at the University of Buffalo (now SUNY
Buffalo) and looking for moonlighting programming jobs.  The Sylvania
Electronic Systems group that in those days was located on Great Arrow St.
in Buffalo came looking for someone and hired me to write and run a program
that would simulate the following system, subject to some possible detail
loss in the past 43 years :-)

A rectangular grid with radio transceivers located at the grid
intersections.  Each transmitter could only be heard by the four
immediately adjacent receivers.  The transceiver stations were to receive,
store and then and forward all or some limited count of the messages they
had received.  The simulation would run in a series of cycles.  The program
would be started with some small number of stations in the grid having
their own single message to send to some other station in the grid.  The
program would be run until all of the messages were received at their
destinations.  The total number of cycles and the number of times each
message was received at each station were to be recorded and reported.  I
don't remember the number of intersections in the grid but it probably was
20x20 or so.  In any case it was too many to be able to use Fortran on our
little IBM 1620 computer so I had to code it in SPS, the assembler for that
machine.  Made $100 for my efforts.  Had to stay overnight in the
Engineering building to make the runs so I could feed the card punch.

OK, so much for nostalgia.  I never heard of any 1960's military radio
system that used that sort of store and forward messaging system.  Have any
of you seen or heard of something like this back then?  I had been thinking
of it as a short range system for local comms on a battlefield but I
suppose they could have been thinking about something far more global.
Sylvania was involved with B-58 electronic systems in those days....

Clare Owens  N2RJB