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P19 --- Photo of my wife's ginkgo tree, about 30 years old. This
was planted from a seed from a tree at Hill and Washtenaw in
Ann Arbor. "A deciduous
resinous tree (Ginkgo biloba), native in China but cultivated in
the United States for its fanlike foliage ---- . Regarded as the
only surviving member of a family that flourished millions of
years ago, during the time of the dinosaurs." Funk and Wagnalls. |
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P20 --- Photo of the Ginkgo leaf. These trees are slow growing and hardy.
130 feet tall and 1000 years old. |
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P21 --- N. P. Psytar photo from a 1959 report. In 1954 we were
running out of space using conventional relay racks. We were limited
to two rooms for Spike Tanner's work. This machine used a true random number generator, designed and built by me, based on white noise generated by a General Radio White Noise Generator. We worked with some not so random techniques in the early summer of 1953. Then the initial ideas for the noise source randomization occurred mid-summer and by fall of 1953 the system was functioning. At this time we invented the term "wrap around probability distribution curve". To solve the space problem our idea was to use steel channel iron to make our own tall racks and attach these to the building. Approval was needed. Bill Welch, the director of EDG, was not around so we found Joe Boyd, the assistant director. We sold Joe Boyd on the idea and received our approval. The net result was that this equipment was never moved when other musical chairs occured in the building. Dr. Joseph A. Boyd later went to Radiation as CEO and combined this into Harris Corp and became it's CEO. Bill Welch went to Motorola to head its military divison. N. P. Psytar was used to do all of Dr. Wilson P. Tanner's auditory experimental work on signal detectability. As mentioned elsewhere Ted Birdsall coined the name N. P. Psytar. Previously experiments were visual and randomization was tediously obtained manually from random number tables. This was 1951 and 1952. Digital computers were a rarity, only a few in the world. Michigan had one at Willow Run using a liquid mercury accoustic delay line as read write memory. This was probably about 1000 bits long and 1 microsec bit spacing. Expensive to run and not an available resource. Thus, pseudo random number generation was not feasible. Everything had to be done with vacuum tubes because there were no useful or available transistors, let alone integrated circuits. Shift registers with vacuum tubes were not very feasible. |
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Note 1:
If a search engine brings you to this site and you do not know
why, then save this page to a file on your computer (under FILE
you would use SaveAs) and after saving, then open the file with
a word processor and search for the words individually that
you used in your search. For example if
the words --- drag torque --- bring up this
site and this page of this site, then you would first search for
drag or torque and look around those locations.
Pick If_search to return to beginning. .
Copyright
© 2003, 2004, 2005 Gordon A. Roberts All
rights reserved. 050128-1035
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