Up until the end of 1967 my electronics work was mostly in vacuum tubes and a beginning in transistors circuits as a hobby. The USAFI class brought me up to date on solid state devices and later on into modern integrated circuits. These were the early analog, op amps and the like, and RTL and DTL digital circuits. There is nothing better than learning new technologies while designing electronics with those new devices.
My boss, Bill Austin, manager and senior engineer of the Controls and Displays Laboratory where I worked, attended the same classes. This laboratory was part of a larger system of the Air Force Research and Development command. The building our laboratory was in had housed an old pre-NASA centrifuge for high-G training. One of my projects was designing systems for first XC-142A VSTOL aircraft simulator with Link Mark-I digital computer, the first digital computers used in simulation. We collected parts from damaged VSTOL aircraft until the last one crashed and burned sometime in 1969.
Another interesting project was to design a test bed for the newer integrated instrument panel for the Lunar Module that was due to be put on the Moon. We used an electronic version of the Norton bomb sight used in WW-II bombers. We included altitude, rate of climb and attitude indications on a CRT display that was eventually used for the Lunar Module but aircraft indicator systems from that time forward. The test bed was a beginning and we produced ideas that carried on thought the aircraft industry.
The instrument package for earlier LEM machines was heavy and not as reliable as modern instruments that had been developed during the late 1960’s. The CRT or digital instrument package we had developed was never used in the LEM 11 – 17; however, they did adopt several of our ideas in the lighter and more efficient Integrated Attitude Instrument.
During that period, we began working on projects that were far advanced than our training and education prepared us for, but the USAFI classes began to make us aware of new stuff only dreamed about until then. AI was not even a pipe dream, but elements of it began to enter our minds that we were on the verge of new technologies we only read about in Dick Tracy Comics. It was not long before scientific dudes entered the lab and began talking about stuff only NASA or Martians knew about. cool.gif That was in 1968 and my education continued from then on about what could only be AI, or the thought processes of what would end as AI. That technology was still in the womb, but alive. Wow, that was many Moons ago and we were pioneers in the new stuff.
Here is what I am talking about. This video of Michio Kaku talks about all we were beginning to understand back in the 1960's and it was the birth if A.I. It is difficult to convey if you were not involved with our research. Watch it all. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OjRClPzU6Y