California Surveyors Forums

Man, its tough when the worm turns.

I was sat in my office crunching some numbers, today, when in walked one of my guys.

He made some snide comment about my “ancientâ€￾ HP41CX and I realized that the worm had indeed turned.

Larry, if you’re reading this, and you know who you are, I apologize profoundly for the comment I made &# years ago about your old HP67. You were right. I am now old enough to have a young buck make the same comment to me that I made to you.

Oh, the old ’67:
http://www.hpmuseum.org/67.jpg

And…the NOT so old ’41:

http://www.hpmuseum.org/41cv.jpg

To quote my first boss, Larry, “Just you wait! Some day, some young buck will be making fun of YOUR calculator!â€￾




BTW, Nick, YOUR Thanksgiving is herewith CANCELED!

I'll put my 41 up against anyone any day. Still my crutch.

Ric

My guys refer to my 41 as the "princess"

the machine that works magic ! "the brain"

My dad says the "Curta" was the best thing going. no more slide rule.

ever use the oliveti ?

As a kid, I'd interrupt the fellas as they were "counting" the spins on the oliveti. . . if they lost their place, they'd they'd throw their ink dab rags at me.
If that ink got on my white tee shirt, I was in big trouble at home.

"bad boy" "good"

Gee I am glad I am not as old as you guys. He He.

I still use a 15, sin/con and RP/RP.

For fun I sometimes still use DOS.

And Larry, as promised, manages to secure his revenge. You're welcome, Larry. Unfortunately, in this case, victory has come at the expense of being labled "the worm."

P.S. I'll work on T-day if I must, but I cannot be persuaded to concede my position on the anitquity of said abacus!

During my 2nd year surveying, our crew was slope staking (set miles of the things - seems like all we did for months), and one of the other young guys gets a turn at figuring some stakes, so he whips out his calculator.

The chief saw that and simply said "Put that darn thing away, it'll turn your brain to mush."

I didn't use my calculator in the field as long as I worked for him, and probably was better off for it.

But now after 25 years of using calculators and instruments that not only spit out horizontal and vertical distances for me, but also using little black (or grey, red, or yellow) boxes that calc out angles and distances from where I am to where I want to go, I have to admit that the old guy was right.

I can no longer reduce a slope distance and Z angle to an HD in my head. Thank goodness for my TS that does it for me!


Mush Brain Page.

One of my earliest memories was visiting my Dad, RCE10508, at his office.

He had a big electric Marchand calculator. He was calcing something (I have no idea if it was a traverse or a hydraulic calculation, or something else).

He clicked buttons on the huge keyboard then hit the big compute button. You knew when that thing was calculating, it whirred and clattered and made all sorts of racket.

I said excitedly, "What's the answer Dad?"

He said, "I have to look it up in this big book here."

:)

I found some computer calcs from 1971 in the files last week. Classic Surveyor Jerry told me they would fill out special forms with the thing to be calc'd then take it over to Water Resources which had a big data processing operation. They would punch all of your numbers onto punch cards and run it through the computer over night. The next morning you would pick up your printouts. If you made an error then you had to wait to the next morning for a new run or make a hand correction yourself.

Ian,

I had brought in an old box of surveying "stuff". My guys dug thru it like it was last day at a flea market. They found ancient "gammon reels" attatched to things called plumbobs; a chaining pin [still with red and white paint] a leitz thermometer, that my Dad used for chain tension correction calculation; mechanical pencils (the four-prong type) The guys were fascinated with the stuff and wanted to know what it all was and how it was used AND why we don't use it any more. I really got a kick outta seeing some of that stuff. Memories of how a horse followed me all around eating sunflower seeds from my "pouch" unbeknownst to me.

Cup-tac balls that now look like giant raisins. (what the heck was a cup tack) ? They couldnt believe that I often set them in pavement as a traverse point. [learned that from a real old timer]

the worm may turn, but it must be kept alive ! We simply must keep the old ways in sight in order to be better retracement surveyors.

"good"ish

Wow, goodgps! that (olivetti 101) brought back horrible memories of loading a program into it with a fistfull of magnetic cards the size of a texas ballot card. (ok. maybe an alaska card. ha.) and having to "reload" because it didn't "take" . . . or ol' philly blundered an entry!

that in turn brough back the "slickest EDM of its time" . . . AGA Geodimeter Model 6 (?). Almost the size of a 24-inch homebrew telescope! ha . . . whereby one 'peaked' the light off a bucket of retro-reflectors to get a shot . . . then spent an hour in the office reducing ONE slope distance!

I also remember when ol' Ed Gardner came in with his fancy portable battery operated Texas Instruments(?) calculator that could multiply, divide, add & subtract! (no functions!) we were sooooooooo happy not having to crank the Curta. (still used trig functions . . . but OH SO fast with this newfangled portable that could MULTIPLY!!!!) enter slope distance, reduce the vertical angle to decimal degrees with this speedy tool . . . multiply it all with the corresponding cosine/trig table . . . viola - horizontal distance!

then the Monroe portable!!!!!! . . . which TRAVERSED as you went . . . that was one slick portable!!!!!

then the fancy schmancy Wang . . . I calc'd and drew a lot of tagets for ol' George Colson's Tunnel Laser system on the D.C. Metro tunnel projects off that dear ol' Wang! wudda machine! enough toggles - that would make a shuttle commander envious . . .

I kinda wished I hadn't tossed the old olivetti . . . it would make a nice counter-balance to a aircraft hanger door! ha!

and before the olivetti . . . the ELECTRIC frieden . . . clunkin' away with rythm a happy bed-post in a Virginia City brothel on payday! nice sound. (hey, I ain't "that" old! well, maybe.)

thanks for the memory-jogger, goodgps!

Phil - Sonoma

Wow, goodgps! that (olivetti 101) brought back horrible memories of loading a program into it with a fistfull of magnetic cards the size of a texas ballot card. (ok. maybe an alaska card. ha.) and having to "reload" because it didn't "take" . . . or ol' philly blundered an entry and had to start all over!

that in turn brough back the memory of the "slickest" EDM of its time . . . AGA Geodimeter Model 6 (?). Almost the size of a 24-inch homebrew telescope! ha . . . whereby one 'peaked' the light off a bucket of retro-reflectors to get a shot . . . then spent an hour in the office reducing ONE slope distance!

I also remember when ol' Ed Gardner came in with his fancy portable battery operated Texas Instruments(?) calculator that could multiply, divide, add & subtract! (no functions!) we were sooooooooo happy not having to crank the Curta. (still used trig functions . . . but OH SO fast with this newfangled portable that could MULTIPLY!!!!) enter slope distance, reduce the vertical angle to decimal degrees with this speedy tool . . . multiply it all with the corresponding cosine/trig table . . . viola - horizontal distance!

then the Monroe portable!!!!!! . . . which TRAVERSED as you went . . . that was one slick portable!!!!!

then the fancy schmancy Wang . . . I calc'd and drew a lot of tagets for ol' George Colson's Tunnel Laser system on the D.C. Metro tunnel projects off that dear ol' Wang! wudda machine! enough toggles - that would make a shuttle commander envious . . .

I kinda wished I hadn't tossed the old olivetti . . . it would make a nice counter-balance to a aircraft hanger door! ha!

and before the olivetti . . . the ELECTRIC frieden . . . clunkin' away with rythm a happy bed-post in a Virginia City brothel on payday! nice sound. (hey, I ain't "that" old! well, maybe.)

thanks for the memory-jogger, goodgps!

Phil - Sonoma

Sounds like from all the posts, you all need to look into becoming a member of the Mount Diablo Surveyors Historical Society!

A great organization established to preserve the infrastructure of California (surveying related).

Check out our website at www.mdshs.org

If I remember correctly, the "Wang" computor took up one whole office room and the temp had to be kept low.

Sin cosine and tangent tables along with a good slide rule was still a convenient problem solver even in the early '70s.

Most of the older guys I worked with, had their "sine" curve tables memorized.
My Dad liked to use the "versine" for some applications.
I cant remember, but isnt the versine simply 1/x of the sine ?
Kinda like the cotangent ? is to a tangent ?

Matt H matition

The versine your dad used was probably "1-cos m". Undoubtedly to calculate the sagitta (also known as the "middle ordinate")

[It's also equal to 2 sin² (m/2)].

And the radius minus the sagitta is the apothem.

Yup Dave,

I checked with him just a few minutes ago. these are handy for laying out curves by chord method i s'pose. He reminded me to keep my middle ordinate under control :~}

some days you feel like a sagitta, some days you feel like an apothem.

Keep your angles complimentary

"Good"