In my early college days, We had to do Boolean algebra using binary, octal and hex - hated the stuff. But this reminds me of those days where you "loaded" the instruction - "Fetched" the result - these "steppers" we're like from WW2 era - old tube types or very early solid state - before TT and L became the norm. You "walked thru" the program using these "rotary" relays - and it'd sound a lot like you hit a jackpot once the printed result arrived...
They used J/K and Master/Slave Flip-Flop setups for the Boolean AND/OR and their opposites like NAND, NOR or XOR type of stuff - all in Binary - UGH...
Good to see there was another use for them - if only for the novelty of having a relay "toggle" PLL lines or swap in a crystal or two...kinda' makes it look "official" - hidden from the KGB - James Bond - Professor "Q" and his gadgets.
:+> Andy <+:
You beat me to it! LOL.....I was going to say much the same thing. Having worked n Telcom, Aviation and Automotive industry during and after college I have seen a lot of this.
A lot of plants have been built on top of older plants and they often leave large chunks unmolested. So you have to open a bathroom window that leads to a window in an older part of the plant and then amazingly it is like you traveled back in time. The power and wiring and all the old machinery being largely intact and forgotten about by 99% of the people in the plant. So you can easily see everything from the 1940's-1980's before a major plant renovation dusty but like new.
Same thing in Telcom in the 1990's I would be installing and turning up fiber optic equipment while making free calls all over the world on vacuum tube gear that was still in the central offices.
Relay activated logic ladders where all the rage for some time. Even in older industrial HVAC you freq. will see 20-30 relays. I do not miss that sort of thing at all. The troubleshooting was the problem what takes minutes today could take hours with relays.
The company I worked for in the auto industry had machines that were decades old and where literally being held together with bailing twine and duct tape. The machinery for a very popular durable engine was so obsolete parts were not available and the companies that made the machinery did not and would not serve them anymore not even historical technical catalogs and archives. That really was not my job but I had a reputation for putting out fires that most engineers would not even go near. I would run into that sort of technology all the time. A lot of parts had to be made in-house or we would send the design to Taiwan and have them do a rapid prototype and 24hour airmail it back to us in the USA.
The machinery was so bad that they designed a completely new hi content V6 to replace this older design because the cost of tooling would have been the same to replace for the old engine design with new tooling. So they hoped that they could eliminate some NVH while gaining power and lowering emissions all at the same time.
I would have to go exploring in parts of the plants that technically did not exist on paper but were time capsules not on the newer blueprints at all. I had to "Rob Peter to pay Paul!"
If I had not had an uncle that was career Navy Electrician on Nukes I would have been lost. He is dead now but when I would fill like I was in over my head I would take him some single malt and pick his brain! While I was aware of sort of technology I had never seen anything like these in real life with so much complication. It was layers ontop of layers.I would often shack my head and say to myself " What the hell were they thinking?" A pencil and paper was a valuable tool because you could not hope to keep it all straight in your head you had to draw it out and write stuff down make flowchart scratch stuff out and start again etc....
I will say this it amazes me what my Dad and Grandfathers generation were able to do with such simple and primitive devices by adding layer upon layer of simple devices like relays.
Without a historical perspective, most people my age 44 and younger just have no clue how good we have it with such cheap and readily available microcontrollers, CPU's, firmware driven custom app's and crazy powerful and cheap ic's and semiconductors in general. One digital control module that can fit in your hand can take the place of 20+relays, multiple transformers, chokes and hundreds of feet of wire!
I am not sure everyone knows this but in the old days a military grade capcitor, for instance, electrolytic that today is no larger than a cigarette filter would be the size of pop can. Tantalums used in military gear were only used at half of their specified rating. A lot of the guys that designed and built a lot of your industrial gear post-WWII up through the 1990's where ex-military or the company they worked for had defense. So these guys would build commercial capital goods and such just like they would design and build things for the military. It was only as these guys retired or died off and the next crop of engineers were trained mostly for consumer type electronics that you really started to see parts shrink massively and have far less headroom and durability.
Keep in mind post WWII, Korea, and Vietnam you saw a HUGE increase in men taking college classes with their GI Benefits. NASA was almost entirely men that where ex-soldiers that had mostly 2 year degree's Master's and PHd.'s where almost unheard of in NASA, early aviation and robotics.
Look at how many parts where needed pre-PLL in a CB. Look at how many caps were using in early CB radio's compared to today as well. If one of my kids went to school for electronics they would not dream of using something like a channel selector they would instinctively reach for an encoder. A different way of thinking and different technology today!
P.S. I have never seen that approach in a CB radio before so that was cool to see! Thanks for sharing!
