On 11/17/2011 1:25 PM, Jon Elson wrote: > Kent A. Reed wrote: > >> Oh, man. Check out that control rack, especially the reel-to-reel tape >> (punched paper?) reader at the bottom of the stack. Reminds me of my >> early minicomputer days. I get misty-eyed thinking about those days but >> boy am I glad we've made some progress since! >> >> > Hell, that's nothing! Have you seen a GE Mark Century, or a GE tape-NC > control? > I got the motion control hardware out of a GE tape NC control, and > looked at, > but ran away screaming, from the control itself. It was about 500 > paper-phenolic > one-sided PC boards with a couple germanium transistors and a bunch of > diodes on each board. That was the basic XY positioning control, they added > another few hundred boards to do linear interpolation, then a few > hundred more > to do circular interp. Now, THOSE controls were monsters. I can't IMAGINE > how you kept one of those things working. No computer at all, no way to run > "diagnostics", you had to program a path and see if the control executed > what > you told it to. If not, be ready to hit E-stop. > > Jon > > >
GE Mark Century... should I post a few pictures of one?? :-) I work with one once in a while on a large lathe - 100 hp spindle etc. However I try and avoid it! The romance with that control wears off pretty fast as Jon mentioned. Yes, it was well designed ages ago but it really deserves to be in a museum someplace rather than on a machine tool. I expect I will be retrofitting this lathe one of these days with EMC2 and when I do it will lose 5-800 lbs in controller weight. And this is a newer one with a couple of Intel 8080's on some of the boards. It even has onboard retentive memory!!! This was one state of the art control many years ago. Still, I think the control has at least 20 plug in PC boards. The controls flake out once in a while. If they don't start up the machine and let it run for 4-5 hours in cooler weather so it will heat up and stabilize, the controls will fault out periodically while cutting. Not good when you are trying to make parts for pay. Dave ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. IT sense. And common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-novd2d _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
